


every tiny word you sent to me (measure out a life, both of ours)

by awkwardspiritanimals



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: Alternate Universe - Soulmates, F/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, mentions of canon-typical violence and sexual assault, mentions of canonical domestic violence
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-11
Updated: 2019-04-12
Packaged: 2019-10-26 02:53:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 30,419
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17737619
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/awkwardspiritanimals/pseuds/awkwardspiritanimals
Summary: “It’s just so romantic, Rafi! A love story through books!”He resists the urge to roll his eyes, even though the rack of books he’s looking through block him from the front counter’s line of sight.“It’s not a love story, Tía Claudia. It’s only my soulmate.”(He's right and he's wrong, is the thing. A story about soulmates and words and choices.)





	1. 'cause it took me years to say the words that you did not even need said

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter One, in which our heroes discover they have soulmates and spend roughly three and half decades not doing much at all about it except feeling some things.

“It’s just so romantic, Rafi! A love story through books!”

He resists the urge to roll his eyes, even though the rack of books he’s looking through block him from the front counter’s line of sight.

“It’s not a love story, Tía Claudia. It’s only my soulmate.” He thinks that whoever it is must be working on a final project of some kind, with the school year coming to an end, because his arms have been covered in long maroon lines and notes for about a week now. Rafael hopes that either the book is really interesting or they get a good grade, considering the amount of work that has shown up on his skin.

“ _Only your soulmate_? What sort of nonsense is that?”

“Oh, come on, tía. Whoever she is has been writing on Rafi’s arms for six years now, and he’s never once written back. She probably doesn’t even know she has a soulmate,” Eddie says from his spot leaning against the counter. He doesn’t read much, but he’s always willing to come down to Claudia’s little store with Rafael.

“I don’t write in books,” Rafael says.

It’s been a convenient excuse for the past few years, since he had figured out that the soul words showing up on his skin were coming from his soulmate underlining passages and taking notes in the  margins while they read. He’d paid good money for his books and it felt disrespectful to mark them up, and it wasn’t his fault that his soulmate didn’t feel the same way. It’s something he can tell people about why he’s never tried writing back, and avoid talking about anything else.

“Plenty of people who never meet their soulmates lead happy and fulfilling lives.” _And plenty of people who do find them are unhappy_ , he adds in his mind.

“So you’re just going to keep writing your initials on the inside of front covers and leave your poor soulmate wondering like that?”

“Yes. And see, she knows more about me than I do about her, and she’s never tried to say anything. Maybe she doesn’t care either.”

“Or maybe the front cover doesn’t actually count as the book,” Claudia says, giving him a look as he sets the two books he’s picked out on the counter.

“Which probably means that she has no idea she even has a soulmate,” he replies, even though he doesn’t technically know that. But no writing has ever shown up on any other part of his body, so as far as he knows they’re connected only through their arms and their books.

“You’ve got no romance in your soul, Rafael Barba.”

“Oh, he’s got plenty of _romance_ ,” Eddie says, grinning, “Just ask Yelina.”

Rafael glares at him as he hands over his money and tucks his new books under his arm, but Eddie just laughs and throws his arm around his shoulders, waving to Claudia as he pulls him out into the sunshine. It’s a nice day, warm and bright, and he’s got two new books, and he can almost ignore the faint feeling of his soulmate’s looping handwriting ringing its way around his left elbow.

\------------

Olivia likes the days when she gets an entire collection of _RB_ s, five or six at a time. She can’t help herself, not when whoever her soulmate is clearly loves the books he so carefully initials, even if he never uses them to talk to her.

She’d grown up in a house full of books, all marked up and sticky-noted by her mother, so she hadn’t thought anything of it when she had started to write in her own, first in the ones she was assigned for school and then the ones she read for fun. It was a habit, putting her thoughts into words in the margins, underlining passages she liked or ones that seemed important, and she can’t blame her soulmate for not having those same habits. After all, it’s not like she’s made any attempts to talk to him either, so it would be a little unfair to be that upset about the fact that all she gets in return is little green _RB_ s along her arms, usually two or three a month, with enough time in between that the last marks have almost completely faded by the time the next ones write themselves onto her skin.

Plenty of people don’t have soulmates, or don’t know they have them because they never stumble across whatever it is that allows them to write back and forth to each other. At least she knows for sure that there’s someone out there, connected to her, even if all she ever gets from him are neat sets of his initials.

\--------------

Yelina traces one finger along some of the marks on the arm resting across his stomach. He isn’t sure why she hasn’t left, why both of them are still lying here on his bed, but letting go of her is completely unthinkable. So they lie there, together, a soft breeze and the noise of the neighborhood drifting in through the open window. His mother will be home soon.

“It’s not- you know it’s not because of those, right?”

“I know,” she says, not looking up at him.

She’d been there that day in third grade, when he’d looked down at the flutter of sensation against his arm in time to watch three maroon lines ink themselves across his skin. And she’d been there almost every day since, as his friend and as something more, for almost a decade of his insistence that finding his soulmate wasn’t important to him, that he wasn’t interested in making any connection beyond the writing on his arms, which he had no control over, and he’s pretty sure Yelina has even figured out exactly why he’s so insistent that his soulmate is better off without him. He believes her when she says she knows that the soul marks aren’t why he can’t marry her.

Rafael wonders if he’s supposed to ask if she’ll come with him, if what she’s waiting for is for him to mention that there are plenty of colleges in Boston, that they don’t have to stay here to stay together. But he knows Yelina loves the Bronx, is planning on spending her whole life here, that she’s vaguely baffled about why he wants to go away to Harvard and everything it represents in the first place. So he’ll keep his mouth shut, and she’ll stay and he’ll go away, and it will only have been him who made a choice between a place and a person, chose Harvard over a life with her. He’ll be the one that chose, and that will be his burden, and everything will be fine.

At some point, his mother comes home and they can hear her in the kitchen, starting dinner. Yelina pushes up from where she’s been laying against his shoulder and looks at him for a long time before she leans down to kiss him-- soft and slow and already half gone. Neither of them say anything, and when he starts to sit up so he can walk her to the door, she shakes her head.

He spends the rest of the evening lying in bed, watching his soulmate conjugate Italian verbs across his bicep.

\------------

She jumps the first time her soulmate writes more across her arms than his initials.

“What happened? Is there a bug?” Julia asks, looking up from her books. When she sees Olivia studying the green writing along her arms, she pushes herself across the room. They’ve been rooming together since freshman year, and she knows all about Olivia’s soulmate and his initials. “Holy shit. Is he writing to you finally?”

“You know we don’t write to each other,” she says, but she’s not actually paying that much attention to her roommate, too busy twisting her arms around so she can watch the writing work its way up the inside of her upper arm. His handwriting is messy, so different from the carefully inscribed _RB_ s, and she can’t help smiling at this small detail she now knows about her soulmate.

“If he hasn’t decided to write _to_ you, why the sudden enthusiasm?” Julia says, brushing her fingers against a couple of lines that extend from her forearm up onto the back of her left hand, and there’s the familiar sound of fluttering pages close to Olivia’s ear, like someone is running their thumb over their edges. “Wait, maybe he writes in his textbooks like Mike does.”

She holds up her own arms, covered in thick smears of dark yellow where her boyfriend has highlighted passages in his econ textbooks. _I love you_ is written in blocky letters across the knuckles of her right hand, like he’d written it absentmindedly in a margin while he was studying, not bothering to switch to something with a finer point, a spontaneous reflex of a gesture to his soulmate more than a conscious act, and Olivia fights a ridiculous moment of jealousy.

It’s just as much her fault as it is his that they’ve never directly spoken to each other. There’s a copy of _Wuthering Heights_ sitting on her desk, half full of notes already, and it would be easy enough to grab it and scrawl _Hi, my name’s Olivia_ in one of the margins, or even something faux casual like _I just figured it was time we introduced ourselves._ Maybe he’s just never realized that it’s books that connect them, or that wherever he’s writing his initials still means that they show up on her arms, or that textbooks even count in the same way that novels do; maybe her soulmate is the one who has really been waiting almost a decade for her to give some clue to her identity or their connection in among all the soul writing she is sure she’s left on his arms all these years.

It would be easy, especially now that she knows he has something he’s willing to write in.

Instead, she just traces each new line or word as it shows up on her skin, enjoying the little flashes of warmth against her fingertips.

\--------------

“You and Rita have a grocery list around here somewhere?” Devine asks, and Rafael looks up from his textbook.

“Try the fridge. Why do you need our grocery list?”

He holds up a sheet of paper, covered in his neat, cramped handwriting running in every direction around a short list. “Ran out of room on mine.”

“Can’t you just make another one?”

“The universe gets all tetchy if I haven’t bought the stuff on the one I’ve got. No idea how it knows that, but it won’t let anything through until I actually have all the groceries from the last one. Ah-ha!” he says, pulling the list off of the refrigerator and returning to his place across from Rafael, sitting cross-legged in his chair so he can see the lilac writing across the dark skin of his feet. “I knew a guy in high school who could just keep using the same list over and over again if he wanted to, but the marks only showed up on the backs of his shoulders, so he had to use a mirror or get someone to help him out any time he wanted to actually know what his soulmate was saying back. I’ll take my setup any day.”

Rafael glances down at the maroon writing on his own arms. There’s been a lot less of it the past few years, and ridiculously enough he finds that he misses it, a feeling which he has no right to. When he looks up again, Devine is watching him, thumb pressed against his instep.

“What?”

“I don’t think your soulmate hates you.”

“I-What?”

“You’ve got that look on your face like you’re thinking about how your soulmate probably hates you because you’ve never gotten in touch with them after all these years. It’s a look I know well.”

“You have a lot of friends in this situation?”

“Mostly just you. But you make the face a lot.”

“What face?” Devine shifts to balance his arms on his crossed legs, looking down at them with an exaggeratedly morose expression. “I don’t look like that.”

“Look like what?” Rita asks, emerging from her room, and Devine repeats his pose. “Barba having another existential crisis about his soulmate?”

“I don’t do that.”

“It’s pretty much all you do. You read, you study, you have existential crises about the fact that the universe so unfairly saw fit to give you a soulmate.”

Rita, as far as she knows, does not have a soulmate. She seems far less bothered by that than the fact that Rafael won’t talk to the one he has. As she crosses to sit on the opposite side of the couch from Rafael, she flicks at his ear, and he jerks his head away from the sting.

“What was that for?” he asks, but Rita just gives him a look, “How come you never give my soulmate this much grief, _in absentia_? It’s not like they’ve ever written to me either.”

“Oh, someday. If you ever end up meeting them and aren’t too wrapped up in yourself to figure out who it is, I’m going to have words. But until then, there’s only you, because he-” She jerks a thumb in Devine’s direction- “at least talks to Danny.”

 _And Danny talks back_ , he almost responds. But if he says that, or anything else, the conversation will continue but won’t go anywhere, and besides, all three people in the room know the fear that his soulmate won’t be interested in writing back to him isn’t the main reason he’s never said anything to them. He doesn’t want to talk about any of it, so he keeps his mouth shut.

Rita looks like she’s considering bringing it up anyway, one way or another, but then she just turns on the couch so she can shove her toes under his thigh, cracking open her book on her lap. After waiting for a few seconds to see if she’s just trying to lure him into a false sense of security, he turns back to his own work, telling himself that he’s tucking his right hand into his left elbow because it’s the most comfortable way to hold his book, that it has nothing to do with the soft, slow pulses of warmth across his skin where his pinkie rests against a few faded maroon lines.

\-------------

Olivia shifts in her chair again, and Patrick looks up from his work.

“You sure you’re alright?”

“Yeah, fine. Probably shouldn’t have had that last cup of coffee, that’s all.”

Too much caffeine is a good excuse, considering how long they’ve been at their desks catching up on paperwork, but she doesn’t actually feel all that twitchy. It’s just that all afternoon there’s been the ghost of sensation all across her hips, like someone is just barely tracing the tips of their fingers over her skin. If she didn’t know any better, she’d think that-

She stands abruptly, and Patrick looks up from his desk again, both eyebrows raised.

“It’s nothing,” she says, waving off anything he might say, “I just- I’ll be right back.”

The bathroom is empty, which she’s thankful for, but she still ducks into the last stall as she pulls her shirt out of her waistband. And there, all over the skin of her hips and lower stomach, is the deep green handwriting that she knows almost as well as her own. Olivia laughs in disbelief, dropping her head back against the wall.

She’s just started to get used to only having his initials again. It’s easier than it might have been because she’d assumed from the start that it would happen someday, and she’d gotten seven years where she’d been expecting four, but it still feels like her soulmate is more distant from her than ever before. Or at least it _had_ felt like that, she thinks, watching another line write its way across her skin.

It’s impossible to see what is being written from this angle, and when she presses her fingers there all she gets is the faintest sound of pen against paper. She wonders if her soulmate has been dealing with this for years without her ever knowing, and, God, she’s never been more aware of exactly how sensitive the skin across her hips is.

She knows she should be annoyed, that this is only going to make concentrating on paperwork harder, not to mention any number of other things for the foreseeable future until she gets used to the sensation, but she can’t resist a small smile. There’s what seems like pages and pages of notes now written across her skin, and even if it’s only a one time thing, even if it all fades in a month and there’s never anymore, she knows now that there is something else out there that connects her to her soulmate.

Olivia presses the tips of her fingers against the writing again, just to feel the new and familiar warmth for a few seconds, eyes catching on the faded _RB_ at her wrist. Then she takes a deep breath, pushes away from the wall, and neatly retucks her shirt into her waistband. There’s paperwork to finish, and she doesn’t need to see the soul words to know that they’re there.

\-------------

He can feel a migraine building behind his temples, and he probably should have let Rita bully him into leaving an hour ago when she’d tried it, but he can’t get his opening statement for the trial starting tomorrow to flow like he wants it to and he knows he’ll work better alone in the almost empty courthouse than he would at home.

Well, almost alone. About an hour and a half ago his soulmate had picked up a book, but after 25 years there are few things less distracting. He breathes, his heart beats, his soulmate makes abbreviated literary observations all over his arms. He doesn’t even bother looking up from his notes until he feels the odd tug that means they’re erasing something, and even then it’s only a glance.

_Hi. My name is O-_

It’s a few seconds until his brain catches up with his eyes and he realizes what he’s just read. By the time he looks up again, everything but _Hi_ is gone, and then that disappears too, leaving just a long smear of maroon down his forearm.

 _O_. It’s just the one letter, but it’s the most he’s ever known about his soulmate. And the _Hi_ means that it was intentional, the first time in two and a half decades that either of them have reached out to the other, and he can’t tell if the dull pain in his gut is because they’d reached out or because they’d so clearly regretted it so quickly. He forces himself to close his eyes and concentrate on his breathing, except that after a few deep inhales and long exhales he realizes that what he’s actually concentrating on is trying to recall the shape of the words against his skin. Shaking his arms out like that will dislodge the idea, he stands and takes two steps before realizing that there’s nowhere he can go to get away from this.

He should go home. He should go home and sleep, or drink and then sleep, except he’s got a trial starting tomorrow morning so he can’t do that. So he should go home and sleep and not think about his soulmate. Except of course that if he stops working and goes home and doesn’t think about his soulmate, he’s going to think about his father, whose health is failing.

His health is failing, and Rafael’s mother has called him four times this week, asking him to visit before it’s too late. _It’s already too late, Mami. It’s been too late for years_ , he’d finally snapped the last time they’d spoken, thinking of bruises underneath dark ink. He knows he needs to apologize, but the last thing he wants is to call to say he’s sorry and end up in a fight with his mother about his father. So he needs to stay here and work, so that he doesn’t think about his father or his mother or his soulmate.

When he sits back down though, his eyes focus not on his notes but on the smudged maroon line on his arm. He’s not sure what he’s expecting when he rests his fingertips there, but there’s something comforting about the fact that there’s only the familiar ruffling of pages and the spreading warmth, the one indulgence he occasionally allows himself in regards to his soulmate. Nothing has changed except for the one small thing he now knows about his soulmate.

Rafael wonders what had happened that had inspired them to reach out. Wonders, not for the first time, if their reasons for not reaching out before this are similar to his own or entirely different. Wonders if he’d feel less guilty about it if he explained himself just once, pulled down one of his books and scribbled out the best explanation he could manage. _Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine._

He wonders if his soulmate likes poetry.

The errant thought brings a smile to his face, a sudden bright spot. _My soulmate O, who writes in their books and may or may not like poetry._ That somehow makes them seem both more and less daunting, and he finds himself glancing towards the bookshelf behind his desk before he shakes his head, grabbing his notebook instead.

Someday, maybe. When his guilt and his hope and his father, dying but not yet gone, weren’t sitting quite so heavily in his gut. For now there was work, and not thinking about any of it.

\-------------

“I don’t get why you don’t just talk to the guy.”

Olivia glances over at him. “The perp?”

“Your soulmate,” Elliot says, nodding at where she’s got her right hand wrapped around her left arm, fingers spread a little to cover as many of the _RB_ s on her arms as she can reach at once. It’s an old self-comfort gesture she settles into when there’s nothing to do but wait, and she hadn’t even noticed she was doing it. She doesn’t move though, despite the sudden urge to tug her sleeves back into place and hide her soulmate away from Elliot’s judgement. It’s the middle of summer and too hot in the car even in the middle of the night with the windows cracked for that anyway.

She shrugs instead. “I’ve told you, I just don’t feel like I need to. Not everyone’s relationship with their soulmate is the same as you and Kathy’s.”

The writing on Elliot’s arms is such a pale yellow it’s hard to see most of the time. The cheap notebook with the cardboard cover he uses to write to her is tucked between his seat and the center console where he’d stuck it when Kathy had told him she was going to bed.

“I know that, Liv. It’s just that you’ve known about this guy since you were a kid, and you’ve never wanted to talk to him? To meet him?”

“I’ve never said that,” Olivia says, thinking of the night a few years ago when she’d had a bad day on top of a worse week, and she’d had the sudden urge to know and be known, despite the consequences. She’d regretted it immediately and erased the message about three seconds after she’d finished writing it, but still. It certainly wasn’t the first time she’d thought about it, and it wasn’t the last. “If for whatever reason he doesn’t want to talk to me, I’m not going to force it. If the universe is so hellbent on us finding each other, it can do its part. You and Kathy had been writing back and forth for years before that frat party, but you didn’t plan to meet there. It just happened.”

“So you’re just going to wait and hope he shows up someday? What if the universe decides to just have him be the guy ahead of you in line for coffee one day and hope for the best?”

“Then the universe can bite me. Seriously, El, I don’t know how many ways I can say that if it happens, it happens, and if it doesn’t, then it doesn’t.” She shrugs. Her connection to her soulmate might be small, but it’s there, and she doesn’t want to risk that trying to force him into something he’s obviously uncomfortable with. The soul marks on her arms and even her hips have been the most stable and consistent part of her life for a long time now.

Elliot looks like he has more to say, and Olivia barely holds in a sigh, ready to explain the same things she does every time he or one of the few other people who have seen her marks and know about her relationship with her soulmate decide to have this discussion again. She’s saved by their perp emerging from the building they’ve been watching down the street, and Elliot immediately snaps to attention to start the car.

She fights a shiver in the stale, overheated July air of the car as she takes her hand away from her arm to put on her seatbelt.

\-----------------

“Barth, you have to finish soon so we can go buy Barba an actual drink, because if I have to watch him morosely pine over his soulmate for much longer I’m going to throw something at him and that’s unprofessional.”

Rafael looks up from the second scotch he’s poured himself while they wait for Elana to finish her work so they can go out. “I’m not morose. Or pining.”

“So you’re just making the sad puppy dog eyes at your own arms for health reasons?”

“I’m not doing that.”

“You are,” says Elana without looking up from her papers.

“If you would just talk to them-” Rita starts, and Rafael drains his glass.

“Who’d want me as their soulmate?” he says, and immediately wants to take it back. Normally he’s much better at not reacting to their teasing about his soulmate, but he’s exhausted and a little drunk and there’s been some feeling between his shoulder blades all afternoon, like an itch but not quite, and some of his soulmate’s notes on whatever they were reading had spilled up his wrist and onto the back of his hand, and he’s spent all day catching glimpses of it as he writes.

“Smart, good-looking lawyer on the side of justice with a nice apartment stuffed full of books, the very vehicle of your soulmate connection?”

“Workaholic jackass who has spent decades ignoring them.”

He’s never drinking again. Or maybe he’ll just never speak to Elana and Rita again. He shifts in his seat, trying to relieve the feeling between his shoulder blades, but it’s no use.

“Jesus, Barba, your conviction that meeting your soulmate could only lead to some sort of tragedy and that you are solely responsible for preventing it is genuinely depressing. Look at Barth, she found her soulmate and they’re all happy and gross.”

“We are,” says Elana, still not looking up from her desk. Her arms are covered in the bright red love poems that her wife writes in newspaper margins.

“There’s no guarantee that’s how this turns out,” he says, gesturing at his own arms.

“Love isn’t about guarantees, Rafael. It’s about trusting your connection to another person, whether they’re your soulmate or not. Trusting that it’s good and right, and that when it’s not, you’ll work together to fix it. It isn’t about some magical moment where you first meet your soulmate’s eyes and know this is the person you were meant for. It takes a lot more work and faith than that. And I know you know this,” she says when he opens his mouth, “And we both know that you know it’s both different and the same when it’s your soulmate. Which is why you’re sitting there making-” She turns to Rita.

“Sad puppy dog eyes.”

“-Sad puppy dog eyes at your soulmate’s writing instead of talking to them.” Rafael doesn’t know what to say to that, and Elana closes her folder with a sigh. “Come on, I’ll buy you a drink to make up for lecturing you about your soulmate.”

“And you can buy me a drink for not following my excellent advice in regards to your soulmate for going on two decades now,” Rita says.

“Oh, is that what it’s been?” he responds, but he’s only half annoyed really. He knows that if he ever really asked Rita to stop she would, at least for a while, because she’s done it in the past. “I think you owe Elana a drink for backing you up so eloquently.”

Rita rolls her eyes. “I’m not going to wax poetic about your ridiculousness, Barba. That’s what you have her and Devine for. Who is also happily married to his soulmate, I’ll add.”

He wishes it were that easy. He wants it to be that easy, if he’s being honest. But it’s not.

\---------------

“Sorry we haven’t gotten around to this until now,” Rafael says, but Eddie just shrugs.

“It’s alright. Haven’t really had the time anyway. My mom’s helping out, but it’s still… José keeps asking when she’s coming back, you know? She calls him sometimes, and she keeps talking about him going down to spend a few weeks with her in the summer, but… I don’t really know how to explain it to him.”

It’s been a month since his wife had left for Miami and two weeks since she’d called to tell him she probably wasn’t coming back. Rafael and Alex had been trying to figure out a night to take Eddie out for drinks since they’d heard, but their combined schedules had meant that this was the first chance they’d gotten. And Alex needs to be back in Albany by early afternoon tomorrow, and Rafael has court in the morning, and Eddie has to get home to his boy and his mother, so it’s more likely to be _drink_ than _drinks_. But they’re here, all three of them, and it’s good to be together again, even under the circumstances.

“Well, if you need anything...”

“I’ll let you know. Thanks, Rafi,” Eddie says, as Alex sets their drinks on the table.

“Yelina sends her best. She would have come, but somebody had to stay with the girls.”

Rafael can’t tell if he can’t see the marks on Alex’s neck because the pale pink doesn’t show up well in the dim lighting of the bar or because there aren’t any there right now. Their appearance is intermittent, but when Alex had first started to get serious about running for office, a lot of people had told him he would need to hide them when they were there, that while it was generally acceptable to be married to someone who wasn’t your soulmate, the fact that Yelina didn’t have marks to match could cost him votes.

Because he was Alex, he’d instead gotten very good at giving the speech about how he was sure that his soulmate, whoever she was, was perfectly nice, but Yelina was the only woman for him. She was his soulmate, with no offense meant to the universe, of course. Sometimes when Rafael hears him give it, he thinks of that last afternoon, Yelina’s finger tracing across his arm, the flutter of pages in his ears.

It takes him a second to realize that the sound isn’t just in his memory. Eddie is tapping at three long lines up near his elbow with his fingers.

“You ever going to do anything about these, hermano?”

“Like what? I can’t just ask my soulmate to stop. It’s not their fault that the universe decided on books.”

“I’m not talking about stopping. I’m talking about starting.”

“You think after all this time he’s just going to start writing back?” Alex says, grinning, “Rafi and his soulmate have been ignoring each other for decades.”

 _Ignoring_ pulls at something in his gut, but he doesn’t know how to counter it without talking about how sometimes when he can’t sleep, he’ll lie in bed studying his soulmate’s notes and trying to figure out what they’re reading. He doesn’t want to talk about any of it really, but he especially doesn’t want to talk about all the little ways his soulmate has become important in his life, and why he can’t risk that by actually speaking to them.

Rafael knows that Alex and Eddie, as well as they know him, as long as they’ve known him, wouldn’t understand that feeling.

He wonders if his soulmate does.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is a soulmate system that I made up by taking a bunch of parts from various soulmate AUs that I liked and also some of my own ideas and mushing them all together into one system. Hopefully everything makes a decent amount of sense right now and will make more sense as the story goes on, but if you're super duper confused about something, feel free to ask and I'll clarify.
> 
> Rafael's writing on Olivia's skin is in [#005925](https://www.colorhexa.com/005925), and Olivia's on Rafael's is in [#590200](https://www.colorhexa.com/590200). Title of the fic comes from [Each to Each by Penny and Sparrow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRbcttVvAzU), and the chapter title comes from [The Ship in Port by Radical Face.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lc2-x8qUXm4)
> 
> Chapters 2 and 3 are really the heart of the fic and will both be longer and more substantial than this initial chapter, since this is mostly just to establish the system and the most basic of Rafael and Olivia's feelings about said system. Chapter 4 will really just be a few epilogue scenes that don't fit into Chapter 3 but are important both in their own right within the story and also because I love them. Those parts will be done... at some point. I promise to do my best to get them done in a timely fashion, particularly considering that Rafael and Olivia don't actually directly interact in this chapter. Rafael has more scenes here than Olivia does here, but I promise that evens out throughout the rest of the story.


	2. there's not a word yet, for old friends who've just met

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Chapter Two, in which our heroes meet, and revelations and feelings are had.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning here for two short scenes that feature William Lewis and the associated warnings, one in which Liv has a flashback/dream and one that takes place in the middle of "Beast's Obsession." Also a warning for a scene in which Rafael talks a little about the canonical past domestic abuse he and his mother experienced at the hands of his father.

He’s a jackass, and the fact that he’s good at his job doesn’t make that any less annoying, but both things can be true at the same time. And Olivia can’t deny that she likes the way he snaps into focusing, the way she can watch something shift behind his eyes as he moves from gathering facts to building his case. She doesn’t know how exactly he’s going to work his way through this one, especially with Munch and Fin’s news, but that’s his job and not hers.

She’s about to say that she’ll take stubborn over optimistic any day, except Barba is rolling up his sleeves and the words stall on her tongue, because all up his forearms and disappearing underneath his sleeves are deep red soul marks.

Olivia feels her heart skip in the way it usually does when she notices that someone has marks that match hers, and she glances down at the papers and folders spread across his table to keep herself from staring. Standing next to her, Rollins is not making the same effort, and Barba smirks when he notices.

“Would you like a closer look, Detective?” he asks, tilting an elbow in her direction.

“No, thank you, Counselor,” Rollins answers with a sarcastic smile of her own, “So, you got a plan?”

“The beginnings of one. Tell me about your interviews with the other women again.”

Olivia lets Rollins take the lead and, after she’s sure he’s directed all his attention at the other detective, allows herself a few moments to study Barba’s marks. She can’t tell what any of it actually says from where she’s standing, and she swallows against an irrational surge of jealousy at just how much of the maroon writing there is, forcing herself to look away before she does something stupid like step closer for a better look. There’s a thousand different unwritten rules and opinions about the etiquette of soul marks, and however easily Barba had rolled up his sleeves and made glib remarks at Rollins, she doesn’t know his thoughts on any of them.

She moves up to stand next to Rollins, making sure she doesn’t leave anything out that might help, even though she can tell immediately that Barba is only half listening at best, attention turned inward at whatever plan he’s building. It should be annoying, especially since he’d asked them to run him through everything again in the first place, but she’s worked with plenty of ADAs, good, committed prosecutors, who’d have given up on this case three revelations ago. Barba doesn’t seem to have ever considered it, not even when he was giving Rollins and her shit right at the start, and that’s something.

She can work with stubborn.

\---------------

Rafael doesn’t know if Benson keeps her marks hidden intentionally or if the blazers and jackets she favors for work just happen to keep them covered the majority of the time the two of them spend together, and he doesn’t ask. He hadn’t even noticed the small green marks on her arms until he’d been working with Manhattan SVU for more than a month, and her soulmate was her business. If she paid more attention to his marks, he might be more inclined to return the favor, but he’s never noticed anything more than the occasional glance.

He can’t say the same for the rest of her squad. Fin and Munch had stopped staring fairly quickly-- which makes sense, he supposes, given how long they’ve worked with Benson, and he vaguely remembers hearing through the grapevine that her old partner had been married to his soulmate-- but Amaro and especially Rollins can’t seem to help themselves.

“If you take a picture it’ll last longer, Detective,” he says, and Rollins at least has the decency to look slightly abashed when he looks up from his papers. Fin is due back with an update on their current case any minute, so he’s hanging around the precinct and working for a while to save them a trip one way or the other.

“I’ll, uh, go check on the DNA,” she says, and he can see Benson fighting a smile as she nods.

“What?” he asks, once Rollins has left, and she stops fighting it.

“They’ll stop eventually, I promise.”

“Eventually? It’s been three months. When did they stop staring at yours?”

She only startles a little, and recovers quickly. “Mine aren’t quite as extensive as yours.”

“So what you’re really saying is that you expected them to stop weeks ago and you have no actual idea when they might do so now.”

“If it really starts to bother you, say something to Cragan and he’ll tell them to stop. But you seem more than capable of handling it on your own.”

He wants to ask if the staring is the reason she hides hers, or if it’s something else, some other fear or belief or incident in her past, or if it really is that her work clothes just happen to cover them. But her soulmate is her business, so he just goes back to his work.

\--------------

“Do you know who they are? Your soulmate,” she clarifies, when he looks up at her.

Olivia decides immediately that she’s going to blame him for this. He’s the one who’d asked her if she’d ever been in love _like that_ during the Micha Green case a few weeks ago, and he’s the one with his sleeves rolled up, leaning forward on his elbow as he goes over his notes. She’s sitting next to him, which means it’s pretty much impossible not to catch sight of his marks as she does her own work.

For a few moments, she thinks that maybe he’s just going to ignore the question and go back to his notes, but then he shakes his head.

“We’ve never talked. I’ve never reached out.”

The particular way he phrases that inspires several more questions, but she doesn’t ask any of them. For the first time since she’s known him, he’s deliberately not meeting her eyes when he speaks, his gaze shifting from the papers in front of him to a spot just over her shoulder and back again. She’d known it was a personal question when she’d asked, but she’d been expecting something a lot closer to the sarcastic comments that Rollins and Amaro generally get than _this_. He’s not embarrassed, exactly, or even uncomfortable, but suddenly there’s something vulnerable in his face that she’s never seen before. She thinks it should look strange, but instead it’s just… soft.

“I don’t know either,” she says, surprising herself, “About- I’ve never- I don’t know either.”

His eyes go somehow impossibly softer, and he nods, just once. Then he looks down at his papers and when he looks back up, he’s the Barba she’s more familiar with again. Olivia gives her own nod and opens the folder in front of her.

“What do you need from us in the Hunter case?”

\----------------

She sits up, trying to turn on the lamp next to the bed and press her hands against her arms at the same time.

“Liv?” Brian asks, blinking at the sudden light, “What’s happening? What do you need?”

“Nothing. Nothing.” She’s got both hands clasped around her forearms, trying to match her breathing to the pulses of warmth beneath her fingertips. “I’m going to- I need the light, so I’m going to go out to the living room so you can sleep.”

“I can get up.”

“No, no. You should sleep. I just need- I need the light.”

“Liv-”

“It’s alright. I’m alright. Just… sleep.”

Once she’s out in the living room, she turns on every light there is, even though she knows that all she’s going to see on her arms are the marks. Knows that the burns are only on her chest and her shoulders, knows her brain is taking two different things-- the cigarette burns and Lewis’s interest in her soulmarks-- and pushing them together in her nightmares.

 _Now these_ are _interesting, but I don’t think I like them._

Olivia presses her fingers against the marks again, trying to drown out the sound of his voice with turning pages. She sits on the couch in the light and counts the green marks on her arms, once, twice, three times; there had been four new ones last night, while Brian was making dinner, and she traces a path between them up her arm.

_Do you know who it is? Your soulmate? Well, well. Isn’t that interesting._

There had been something horribly knowing about his voice when he’d looked at the _RB_ s on her arms, and she’s been trying to convince herself ever since that it didn’t mean anything, that it had been just one more way for him to torture her. She’s only been intermittently successful.

When the writing at her hips starts, she’s not surprised, even though it’s three in the morning. More often than not when she’s awake in the middle of the night because of the nightmares, her soulmate is awake too, writing in whatever it is that’s connected to her hips. Sometimes, to distract herself, she’ll find a book and a pencil so she can read, takes notes in the margins and underlines passages.

It’s almost like they’re talking back and forth.

\------------

“Did you ever find her?” Yelina asks, stopping in the doorway, and Rafael doesn’t need to ask who she means. He’d noticed the way she’d glanced down at his arms as they’d stood in front of his desk.

“No. I’ve never looked.” _And you know that._ _You’ve known that since we were eighteen and you asked me to marry you. You’ve known that since we were seven and all of this started._

“I just have one question. Is this in any way… about us?”

Rafael doesn’t say anything, and after a few seconds, Yelina sighs, glancing at his arms again before she leaves. He tries to go back to work, but he can’t concentrate, and he’s almost relieved when Olivia texts him that they’ve got something. He should really know better by now.

While three-fourths of the SVU team makes jokes about the pictures Alex has sent and he tries to keep his emotions off his face, all he can really hear is Alex’s voice. _No offense to the universe, but Yelina is my soulmate._

Everything seems to happen very quickly after that, accelerating with each new revelation. One second he’s sitting across from Alex drinking coffee, then he’s next to Eddie at the park they’d played at when they were kids, then he’s sitting at Forlini’s with Olivia and Amaro as Alex calls him names on television. He wonders if the marks on Alex’s neck are actually more prominent than they usually are or if it’s just that he was there the day they showed up for the first time when they were thirteen.

He doesn’t know why he tells Olivia what his mother had said about Alex, except that it’s Olivia and at some point in the last year and a half his brain had decided without his permission that she’s someone he can tell things he’s told almost no one else. Maybe, having lost Alex and Yelina and possibly Eddie too, because he doesn’t know how they’re going to bridge the gap Alex has blown in their friendship, maybe he’s just reaching out for anyone it feels like he can trust, but he’s pretty sure it’s her.

“You okay?”

He shrugs. “It’s politics. No danger of a traffic jam on the high road.”

Alex was supposed to be different. He’d spent his whole life thinking that Alex was different.

“Still, he was your friend.”

“So was Yelina.” _Was_ feels like something heavy and blunt between his ribs. “She thinks this was personal, not professional.”

When they were eighteen, she’d asked him to marry her and he’d gone to Harvard instead. In the end, they’d both gotten what they wanted, and there are nights when he can’t sleep that he wonders what might have happened if he’d made a different choice, or asked her to make one at all.

“You had a job to do. You did it. That’s all this was.”

She rests her hand against his wrist, and he can’t remember the last time someone touched his marks. The fluttering of pages is less next to his ears and more in his chest, like his heart has kicked into overdrive but lighter.

He reaches for his drink, watching Yelina and Alex on the screen instead of looking at her, trying to keep his voice even as her touch makes it feel like his lungs are rattling.

“Was it?”

\-------------

She’s not really sure if she’d expected Barba to answer at all, and she certainly hadn’t expected him to open the door looking so… comfortable. He’s wearing a worn-in gray hoodie and dark sweatpants, nice but not particularly expensive looking and, she realizes after a few seconds, not all that well fitting either, a little tight around his thighs and too long, bunching up at the tapered ankles. The Harvard crest is stitched onto one thigh above the brand logo.

“Detective,” he says, in a tone that says he’s not going to bother asking how she knows where he lives, “What can I do for you?”

“I just wanted to see how you were.” After the way he’d looked at the courthouse during Muñoz’s arraignment, the things he’d told her at Forlini’s, she’s actually pretty proud of herself for waiting 36 whole hours before checking on him.

“I’m fine,” he says, voice flat, but when he realizes she’s not going anywhere, he sighs and steps aside to let her into the apartment.

It’s nice, a little dark for her tastes but not overly so. There are a few pictures scattered around that she wouldn’t mind getting a better look at if she gets the chance, including one that looks to include both a younger Barba and a younger Rita Calhoun, but what draws most of her attention is the bookcase. It’s massive, custom built if she had to guess, four sets of five shelves with a couple drawers at the bottom of each section, and the entire thing full of books, no room spared for decorative knick-knacks or photos.

“Drink?” She shakes her head. There’s an empty tumbler on the coffee table, next to a facedown picture frame, little pieces of glass visible around the edges. She doesn’t need to ask who is in the photo.

“If you’re not fine, if you want to talk about it, that’s why I came.”

He laughs, but it’s a short, sharp sound without humor.

“My two oldest friends are almost certainly never going to talk to me again, and I’m not sure what I’d say if they tried. The neighborhood where I grew up considers me a traitor for doing my job, and if my own mother is on my side it’s just barely, and more out of habit than because she thinks I did the right thing.” He glances at the picture frame. “I’ve spent the last few days trying to come up with a word to describe that feeling with no luck. I’d really rather talk about pretty much anything else.”

Olivia considers pushing for a few moments, but he already looks so forlorn that she doesn’t want to risk him withdrawing, not when he has let her in at least a little bit. She moves over to the bookcase, tilting her head to read some of the titles.

“Have you read all of these?” she asks, and he comes over to stand next to her.

“A lot of them. I’ve had some of these since I was a kid,” he says, and she can tell. The ones right in front of her are all thick, heavy hardcovers with neat dust jackets, but further down it’s mostly older looking paperbacks, still neat and obviously well cared for but much more worn.

“I think you might be the first person I’ve ever met whose book collection rivals my mother’s.”

“Your mother?”

“She was an English professor. Everywhere we lived when I was growing up was always full of books.”

“What was her area of study?”

“Women in Shakespeare, mostly.”

“Ah. Hence Olivia,” he says, and he smiles-- a real, actual smile, the first one she’s seen on his face in days-- when she turns to him, eyebrows raised, “I’ve read Twelfth Night. In fact, I think my old copy is in that top drawer to your right. I’ve got the big anthologies, but those are much better to display than to read.”

Olivia slides open the drawer he’d nodded at, which is indeed filled with Shakespeare plays, as neatly organized as the ones on the shelves, although the books themselves are considerably rattier.

“I think Tía Claudia-- she owned the used bookstore in my neighborhood-- I think she bought most of them at an estate sale. Sold them to me for four bucks each, took me years to buy and read them all.”

She smiles at the thought of a young Barba buying two or three beat-up Shakespeare plays at a time as she runs her thumb across the pages absentmindedly before she flips open the front cover. And freezes.

Written neatly in the top corner away from the binding are his initials, and she’s suddenly glad she hadn’t taken her jacket off, because she’s having enough trouble controlling her face without having to look at the green _RB_ s written on her arms too. She doesn’t need to see them to know that they match perfectly, that at one point she had almost certainly looked down at her arms and seen this exact _RB_ , decades ago.

“Olivia?”

His sleeves are pushed up, and she can see the maroon handwriting at his wrist that she’d rested her fingers against at Forlini’s, and it’s _her handwriting._ How had she never noticed that, her handwriting on his arms and his initials on hers? How had she spent all those years waiting for her soulmate to stumble into her life, and then spent eighteen months missing or ignoring every single sign when fate had finally seen fit to have him do the actual stumbling?

God, when she’d put her hand on his arm at Forlini’s, there’d been that familiar pulse of warmth at her fingers, but it was _familiar_ , something she’d experienced thousands of times in her life, and she’d been worried about him, about all the things he was trying to keep from showing on his face, and it hadn’t registered that the sensation was being generated in distinctly unfamiliar circumstances.

“Olivia? Is something wrong?” Barba asks, and her eyes jump from his wrist to the book to his face, and his are genuinely worried, and holy shit, Rafael Barba is _her soulmate_.

“No. No, I-” She freezes again, because Rafael Barba is her soulmate, which means that Rafael Barba has spent three decades not writing to her, and she’s spent nearly as long defending his right to make that decision without knowing any of the reasons behind it, and she can’t possibly just blurt out that they’re soulmates, especially not after everything that’s happened this past week. She wants to say it’s in part because she isn’t sure, but she’s rarely been as sure about anything as she is about this.

“Sorry. It’s just- My mother and I,” she says, the first thing that comes to mind, “Our relationship was… complicated.”

“Hmmm.” It’s an understanding sound, and Olivia wants to ask him about his mother, who is only barely on his side over Muñoz, and his father, who he hadn’t mentioned at all, and a hundred other things. Instead, she turns to look at the books again.

“How about a recommendation?”

“What?”

“A recommendation for a book. I think all of this,” she says, gesturing at the bookcase, “Qualifies you as an expert opinion.”

“Oh,” he says, his eyes focusing in that way she can’t help but like, and he steps around her to get to the shelves of paperbacks further down, “Have you read any Terry Pratchett?”

“I’ve heard of him.”

“There’s a set of Discworld books where the main character is a cop. You might like those.” He hands her a small paperback with a green cover, and she hopes that he assumes she’s staring at the book and not the two maroon lines ringing his wrist. She fights a blush when she finds herself wondering if there’s any writing on his hips, and with the possible exception of the day it had first shown up, she’s never been more aware of the writing on her own.

“Are you sure you’re alright?” Rafael asks, and Olivia manages a laugh.

“Pretty sure I’m supposed to be asking you that.”

“You have. A few times. We’re even now.”

“I’ll get out of your hair then. I just wanted to make sure you were…” She trails off, and he gives her a wry smile.

“I’m certainly that.”

 _You’re my soulmate,_ Olivia thinks, but she says, “If you need anything, call me.”

“I will,” Rafael replies, even though they both know that’s not true, “I’ll see you on Monday, Detective.”

“See you then.”

He walks her to the door, but he hesitates when he goes to open it, and she looks up from tucking his book into her purse to find him looking at her, eyes soft.

“Thank you, Olivia.”

“Of course, Rafael. Any time.”

_You’re my soulmate._

\--------------

She’d called Fin because she needs to talk to someone about this, and he seems like the only person in her life who would make the appropriate sized deal about it.

Her very first instinct had been to call Barba, because he had a soulmate, because he’d understand, because in the last year and a half she’s found he’s much easier to talk to than she would have guessed when they met. There are implications to that now that she’s trying very hard not to think about as Fin takes the stool next to her.

“What’s up?”

“I have a soulmate.”

Fin laughs. “Liv, if you think I haven’t noticed that by now, we’re gonna have t-”

“It’s Barba.”

He stops with the drink the bartender had just left in front of him halfway to his mouth. “What?”

“My soulmate. It’s Barba.”

“ADA Barba?” She nods. “You’re sure?”

“Completely.” She tugs up her sleeve so he can see her marks properly.

“Lots of people with the same initials.”

“There are… other factors. I’m sure.”

“Wow.” She nods again, taking a long drink of her wine. “Does he know? You gonna tell him?”

“I’m not sure. On either count.”

“You’ve had your marks since you were a kid, Liv. You’ve waited thirty, thirty-five years for this, and you’ve finally found the guy, and you’re not going to tell him?”

“I’m not sure he wants to know. Like you said, I’ve been waiting a long time. There has to be some reason for that, right? Some reason we’ve never spoken before, when we’ve had every opportunity? I don’t know if I should just tell him.”

“You think either of you are better off with you keeping something like this a secret?”

“I never… I always thought I’d be ready for my soulmate to just show up one day, but now that it’s actually happened? I don’t have a plan. I don’t even know where to start with making a plan.”

“It’s Barba. Do you need a plan?”

“What do you mean?”

“Come on, Liv. You and Barba, you’ve got a thing. A connection, or whatever special soulmate word you want to use. The two of you get each other, you have since he got here. I mean, I wouldn’t have just guessed that he’s your soulmate, but it makes sense. And if you can’t talk _to_ your soulmate _about_ your soulmate, who can you talk to?”

“I’m talking to you,” she says, and he laughs.

“Yeah, guess you are. And if you don’t want to tell him, then it’ll be our secret. But I think you should.”

“Because we have a thing?”

“Because you have a thing, and it turns out that at least part of the thing is that you’re soulmates. The universe approves of your thing.”

“I think… I need some time. I’m glad I know, I really am, and I- I’m terrified about what it all means because…”

“You two have a thing?”

“If this is going to be our secret, we’re going to need to come up with a different word for it.”

“World already did that for you, Liv. He’s your soulmate.”

Olivia smiles, the first time she’s let herself since she realized. Whatever else there is, whatever complications or other feelings there might be, she’s glad she knows. She’s been waiting basically her entire life to know.

“Yeah, he is.”

\-------------

“And you’re not going to put Rollins on the stand?”

They’re in his office, going over his plan and her testimony for Lena Olsen’s trial. Rafael shakes his head, shifting folders to find his notebook and add to the notes he’d taken when he talked to Rollins earlier.

“No, but Efron might. I’ll go as easy on her as I can, but I’ve got to make my case,” he says, but when he looks up from writing he finds that Olivia doesn’t seem to be paying any attention to what he’s saying. Instead, she’s staring at his notebook like it’s about to grow teeth, and he looks down to see what it is that’s caught her attention.

It’s just his usual leatherbound one, the one he writes his thoughts in to organize them before he transfers them to the legal pad he uses in court. Rita had bought him one when he’d passed the bar, saying that he was now officially a lawyer and it was time to stop using crappy notebooks that cost a dollar, and she buys him a new one for his birthday and Christmas every year, and every once and a while she’ll show up on a random Tuesday with one and say she was just feeling generous even though both of them know it’s because she’d noticed the one he had was running out of pages. But Olivia doesn’t know any of that, so there’s no reason for her to be staring at it like it’s going to spill a bunch of secrets across his desk.

“Liv? Do you need one of these folders or…?”

“Sorry,” she says, looking up at him with a smile, and he can’t help smiling back, even though he has no idea what they’re smiling about. She shifts in her seat, sliding a hand underneath her jacket at her hip. “It was just- I’m- Sorry.” She’s looking at his notebook again, and he holds it out to her.

“Did you want to see my notes from when I talked to Rollins?”

“No, no. I trust you to look out for Rollins as much as you can, and I know you’ll make your case.”

“That’s a lot of trust, Sergeant.”

She glances at the notebook in his hands again. “Don’t think you’ve earned it?”

“I try my best.”

“And that’s where the trust comes from,” she says, standing up with her hand still resting at her hip, looking at the notebook again.

She’s been doing that for about a month now, looking at him like there’s something about him that only she knows, going from listening to half present at best and then back again in just a few seconds. He hasn’t been able to figure out a connection between any of the moments, and they happen rarely enough that he hasn’t bothered asking her about it, at least not directly, mostly because he suspects that she’d give him a half answer at best and it doesn’t seem worth whatever awkwardness might ensue.

At first he’d thought it must have something to do with everything that had happened with Alex, that Olivia knew what Alex had done and had seen how long Rafael had stuck by him, and had decided he was someone she needed to be wary of. He’d cast that idea aside quickly though, because apart from those occasional moments she otherwise hadn’t treated him any differently than she had before, and he’s decided that she’ll either stop or explain it to him eventually.

“If you don’t need anything else from me, then I’ll see you tomorrow.” She stops in the doorway, still absentmindedly rubbing at her hip. “You going to stay and work?”

“For a little while.”

He wonders if she wants him to push, if she’s just waiting for him to say something before she explains, but he’s so used to being able to read her, to know at least some of what she’s thinking before he speaks, that he feels off-kilter with the absolute blank he’s drawing when it comes to this. He’s worried he’ll say something in an attempt to figure it out and make things worse, so he just looks down at his desk, turning his notebook to a fresh page.

“I’ll leave you to it then. Good night.”

“Good night.”

Maybe once they’re finished with this case and everything feels less scattered he’ll see if she’d like to get drinks at Forlini’s and ask her then.

\---------------

She asks Brian if it ever bothers him, that she has a soulmate and it’s not him.

He shrugs. “Not really. I mean, you know what connects you and you’ve known for a while, yeah? I figure if you wanted to be with him, you’d talk to him and you’d figure out who he was and you’d do it. But you’re here with me instead, so.” Another shrug and a smile, and then he goes back to watching the game, squeezing his arm around her shoulders with a smile.

It’s her own fault for asking, but she can’t help the guilty pull in her gut at the sentiment, even though it’s sweet and not one necessarily shared by all the men she’s been with, because Brian doesn’t know that the status quo of what she knows about her soulmate had been utterly upended a month and a half ago.

Neither does Barba, and all that guilt compounds itself because she doesn’t know which she feels guiltier about, or which one she should.

Several times in the past few weeks she’s made excuses to take her paperwork and sit at the table in Barba’s office while he works in the evenings, stealing glances at him writing in his notebook as she feels the words work their way across her hips. She’s spent a significant amount of time trying to figure out if there’s some way to ask about it without giving anything away, and an equal amount wondering why it’s such a big deal to her that she not give anything away in the first place.

All of this would be easier if Fin weren’t right, if she could convince herself that the way she feels connected to Barba is just a trick of her brain caused by all the years she’s spent hearing about soulmates, about what it is like to finally find yours. But she knows it’s not that, knows that even at the beginning when she mostly thought he was just a pain in the ass that there was still something there, some way that the two of them understood each other. _A thing_ , and however inelegant Fin’s phrasing might have been, she’s not sure what else to really call it, because once all the goop that movies and romance novels have coated the concept in has been scraped away, it’s really just that simple: two people who understand one another and the string the universe has tied between them. Maybe if she’d realized it right away, if she hadn’t had time to get to know him behind the front, if she hadn’t come to trust and like him beyond that instant feeling of connection, she could just shrug everything off, but every time she tries all she can hear is Fin’s voice. _It makes sense._

And it doesn’t have to have anything to do with her relationship with Brian, not really. Platonic soulmates aren’t even that rare nowadays, and she and Barba work so well together that she thinks that might just be it, that the universe and their own choices had brought them into positions to do difficult work well, and brought them together so that they would have someone who understands them on a level that the universe had decided was just for them to fight alongside. She thinks that Brian might understand that, even though he doesn’t like Barba and she doesn’t think he’d be all that thrilled to find out he was her soulmate. They could make it work, and everything could stay the same.

Except Barba is her soulmate. Except… except sometimes he smiles, not his usual smirk or the polite one he reserves for court or the squad, but a real one that lights up his eyes, and her stomach drops and her brain blanks out, and the fact that she knows he’s her soulmate only makes it worse even though she knows it shouldn’t.

“Liv?”

“Sorry,” she says, shaking herself out of her thoughts when she realizes Brian has been trying to get her attention.

“I asked if you liked your book.”

She glances down at the half-finished novel in her hands. “It’s good. Clever and funny, but it has a lot of heart too.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“I just thought you might not like it. You’re not taking notes.”

“Oh.” It has nothing to do with what she was just thinking about, except of course it has everything to do with it. “It’s a friend’s copy. I don’t want to mark it up since it’s not mine.”

Brian nods and turns back to the television again, and she shifts to lean more solidly against his side. Her thumb brushes back across the pages she’s already read, fluttering them until the pad rests against the _RB_ written at the corner of the front cover.

\-------------------

“You know, I never really got a chance to properly congratulate you on your promotion,” Barba says, hanging his jacket over the back of the stool next to her and nodding at Tony when the bartender sets a scotch down in front of him.

“The one that makes your job harder?”

He smirks. “Let’s be honest, Olivia, you’ve made my job harder pretty much every day since we met.” He takes a drink, but before she can come up with anything sufficiently snarky to say back, he turns in his chair to look directly at her. “And better too.”

It’s not an apology, and she isn’t expecting one, but it is an olive branch across the lingering tension created by the case and their argument.

“Every day?”

“Most days. You know, there was a point, and I can’t even tell you when it happened exactly, but there was a point when I realized that you’d stopped bringing me cases because you wanted _someone_ to take them and you figured my ego meant I would do it, and started bringing them to me because you knew I’d fight, and you thought I could win.”

“I think that’s the most self-aware thing I’ve ever heard you say,” she says, and he rolls his eyes, turning back to face the bar. She reaches over to rest her hand on his wrist, careful not to touch the marks she can see above his sleeve. “We do have each other’s backs. We do.”

“Yeah?” he says, but his shoulders drop and he rubs a hand at the back of his neck. “Here’s to having each other’s backs then.” He holds up his drink.

 _Maybe we can just have this,_ she thinks as she clinks her glass against his. Maybe they can be friends and partners and soulmates, and maybe she doesn’t have to tell him, doesn’t have to risk ruining this. Maybe it’s the best of both worlds, because she gets to know this thing she’s been waiting her entire life to know, gets to have him in her life and be in his, and he doesn’t have to deal with whatever it is that makes his face go soft and vulnerable on the rare occasions they’ve talked about their soulmates.

They can have their thing, universe approved and all, and it never needs to be more complicated than it is right now in this moment.

\--------------

“Have you figured out who it is? You have, haven’t you? About time.”

Olivia stares straight ahead, keeps her face blank. She knows what Lewis wants is a reaction, and she’s not going to give him one if she can help it.

“Does lawyer boy know? Have you told him? You haven’t, have you? Why all the secrecy, Olivia? What, you don’t like him? Or are you worried he won’t want you, now that you’re damaged goods?”

He doesn’t get to take this. Not now that she knows, when she’s waited so long to know, when she know that it is someone who really matters to her, knows that the universe picked right. Not when she’s picked him too.

Lewis has taken a lot from her, some of which she’ll never get back. He doesn’t get to take this.

\--------------

Rafael looks up at the knock on his door.

“Liv, hey. I didn’t think you were back until next week.”

“I’m not,” she says, gesturing for him to stay when he starts to stand and moving to next to him on his couch, “I just… I wanted to say thank you. For sending Rita to help me.”

“Of course. I figured that you wouldn’t even think- I wanted you to have someone there with you, someone who was on your side, and Rita, whatever faults she may have, is the person I’d want on my side. I would have come myself but-”

“But you figured you’d save all that up and yell at the DA instead?”

“I’d do it again. As many times as necessary.” He pulls his knee up onto the couch and rests his arm there so he can face her properly.

“I know. Thank you.” She looks down, biting her lip, and then she surprises him by reaching over and wrapping her hand around his arm. The sound of pages turning fills the space between his lungs. “You know… I’ve told you more about everything that happened than anyone else. You know more than anybody else.”

“I know. Liv, if you ever need to talk- I know you have your therapist, and Cassidy-”

“Brian and I broke up.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

Olivia shrugs. “We’re at different places in our lives. We have been for a while.”

“Still, I’m sorry. If you ever need someone to talk to, about anything, I’m here.”

“I know,” she repeats, still holding on to his arm. He wonders if it’s a method that her therapist gave her, or one that she’d come up with herself, grounding herself in the here and now with touch, but he’s not about to deny her. The fluttering in his chest is nice, even. Unfamiliar, but not unpleasant.

“I should go. I just wanted to thank you. I didn’t even think about needing…”

“I knew you wouldn’t. That’s why I called her.”

“Well, thank you. And pass on my thanks to Rita too.”

“I will. And I’ll see you next week, Liv.”

“See you then, Rafael.”

As he watches her go, he absentmindedly rubs at his arm, warmth flaring under his fingertips.

\-------------

He would just assume it’s a rash, although God knows where he would have gotten one, except that it doesn’t itch, not really. It’s just this _feeling_ all across his back, which had started yesterday afternoon and hadn’t faded. Rafael is just considering going to actually look for himself when his phone buzzes.

“Hey, Liv.”

“Hey, Barba. I’m sorry to call on your day off, but I wanted to let you know that I won’t be in the next few days.”

“Is everything alright?”

“Yeah. Yeah, everything is fine. Everything’s great, actually. I’m, uh, adopting a little boy.”

“What?”

“Ellie Porter’s son, Noah, they’ve been having trouble finding a foster home for him, and Judge Linden asked- she asked if I’d want to do it. So I’ll be his foster parent for a year, and then- then I’ll be able to…” He can hear the emotion in her voice, even over the phone.

“You’ll be able to adopt him. That’s great, Liv. Congratulations.”

“Thank you. So, uh, I’m taking a few days, to get everything sorted and making sure he’s settled and I just-”

“Liv, breathe. I get it. You should take as long as you need. It’s a big thing.”

“Yeah. Yeah, it is. You know when you’re doing paperwork and you hit that point where you start to doubt whether you’re signing your own name correctly? I hit that yesterday afternoon and I still had about a dozen pages to go.”

“Yesterday afternoon?” he asks without thinking, suddenly ten times as aware of the sensations across his back.

“I know it seems really sudden, and it is-”

“No, no, Liv. That’s not what I’m saying. This is great. I was- I was thinking of something else. This is fantastic news, Olivia. Really. Call me if you need anything, if there’s any way I can help, and I’ll see you in a few days.”

“Thanks, Barba. I’ll see you then.”

Once he hangs up, he manages two breaths, one long, one short and sharp, and then he’s on his feet, pacing across his living room and kitchen. The more he tries to convince himself that it’s a coincidence, the tighter his chest gets, and he’s barely able to fumble his phone off the couch where he’d dropped it so he can text Rita. He could check himself, but right now he needs someone else to tell him that he’s imagining things, that what he’s thinking right now is impossible. Rita will make fun of him for it, probably for years, but he also knows she’ll help him.

From the expression on her face when she opens the door and gets her first look at him, Rafael assumes he must look a little crazed, but she steps out of the way to let him in.

“I need you to look at my back.”

“Barba, you know I have a law degree, not a medical one, right? You were there when I got it. So if you’ve got some sort of weird mole or something, you sh-”

“Please, Rita. I need your help.”

She stares at him for a few seconds and then sighs. “Alright. Let me see. But you’d better have a good explanation for this.”

He strips off his jacket and his shirt, leaning on one of the chairs at her dining room table and waiting for Rita to tell him there’s nothing there, to laugh at him for freaking out. Instead, she doesn’t say anything, and he twists to try to see his own back. She stops him with a hand against his shoulder, and he gasps, not at the contact but at the sound of pen against paper that fills his ears.

“Rafael, is there a non-soulmate explanation for why Olivia Benson’s name is written all over your back, or are you about to start freaking out?”

“Fuck. _Fuck_.”

“Option two then. Okay, you need to put your shirt back on, sit down on my couch, and take deep breaths. Really deep breaths.”

He manages the first two parts, but he’s still trying to gasp in enough air by the time she comes back over and presses a glass of scotch into his hands.

“Seriously, Barba, you have to breathe or you’re going to pass out. And if you pass out, I swear I’m going to draw on your face with marker. I know it’s juvenile, but I’m going to do it anyway.” Glaring at her distracts him, and the ache in his chest eases somewhat. Rita grins smugly. “There you go. Now drink that-- slowly-- and we’ll figure out a plan.”

“What plan? What possible plan could we make?” He rakes his hand through his hair once, twice, three times. “I was never supposed to know, I wasn’t supposed to find out. I’ve spent my whole life not finding out. And it sure as hell wasn’t supposed to be- It wasn’t supposed to be-”

“Benson? Oh, come on, Barba,” she says in response to the look he gives her, “If someone had come to me yesterday, said that your soulmate was someone you knew, and asked me to guess who it was, I’d have said Olivia Benson for my first five guesses. You two understand each other, in a way I’ve never seen anybody understand you in all the time I’ve known you. You’re partners, with a capital _P_ or whatever other emphasis you want to put on it, and it turns out it’s got a universal seal of approval.”

“Maybe that’s it then. Plenty of people have platonic soulmates.” Rita scoffs. “What?”

“Yeah, no, that would be a much better explanation if you weren’t in love with her. And you’re not going to get anywhere denying how you feel about Benson to me. I have eyes. And now I know that the universe agrees with me.”

“And what the fuck does the universe know?”

“I’d say that calling its shot on you and Benson by about forty years is pretty good. And we both know that sometimes the universe gets it right. We’ve seen it.”

“We’ve also seen it screw up pretty badly plenty of times.” He sighs, dropping his chin down against his chest. If he didn’t know he was totally fucked before, the fact that Rita is softly rubbing his back really gives it away. “Maybe nothing has to change. Maybe she never needs to know.”

“You really think your best course of action is to keep this a secret? One of the biggest and deepest connections in the universe, and you want to keep it from the person on the other end of that connection with you?”

“I don’t know!” He’s on his feet before he realizes it. “This wasn’t supposed to happen! I wasn’t supposed to know! I was never supposed to have to figure this out!”

“Yeah, Barba, maybe the universe screwed up your plans there. But you know where it didn’t screw you? When it picked Olivia. Will you just take a minute and appreciate that? It’s Olivia. _Olivia is your soulmate._ If you could have picked anyone, you would have picked her.”

He collapses back onto the couch, lets her hand on his back be the comfort she intends it to be.

“That’s part of the problem.”

“I know it is. But other than her name all over your back in magic maroon writing, how much she means to you is maybe the best evidence that she’s your soulmate. You’ve expected this to be a disaster your whole life, but it’s Olivia instead. I know you’re scared, but you’re allowed to be happy too.”

“Yeah,” he says, and he can’t help his smile, because she’s right. His stomach is churning and his chest still feels tight, but there’s a knot of joy and relief too, right between his lungs where the pages flutter when Olivia touches his arms. When Rita or anyone else touches his marks, the sounds are at his ears, but when it’s Olivia he feels it in his chest, because Olivia is his soulmate. _Olivia._

“You went from zero to completely gooey in about two seconds there, so you must be able to see at least some good through the habitual soulmate doom and gloom.”

“I can, just- I don’t know what to do.”

“Yeah, I got that. You should think about it, and you should probably talk to some people about it, and I really do think you should tell Olivia, because she deserves to know. But it’s your soulmate.”

“Right. My soulmate.”

_Hi. My name is O-_

_Olivia._

\--------------

“It’s great, about Liv and Noah.”

“Yeah, it’s fantastic,” he says, letting out his breath when he realizes that Fin is just making small talk and hadn’t noticed that he was staring at the little green _RB_ s on Olivia’s arms.

Rafael doesn’t know how he had never noticed before that it was his initials that made up her soul marks, except that he’d never looked all that closely at her marks. He never looked all that closely at anyone’s marks, but now he’s spent the better part of several hours trying not to stare at Olivia’s and only half succeeding.

“You’ve known Liv for a long time, yeah?”

“‘Bout fifteen years now.”

“Has she always wanted…?”

“Long as I’ve known her. Why?”

 _Just wondering if there’s any other circumstances in which she wrote her name all over my back and I didn’t even notice_.

“Just wondering. I just… No particular reason, just with Noah and everything…”

“You wondering if Liv’s got a couple kids stashed away somewhere that you don’t know about, Counselor?” he says, and now he’s looking at Rafael with something in his eyes that makes him slightly nervous because he doesn’t have any idea what it is. Fin is by far the most inscrutable of Olivia’s squad, but this is something else.

“I- Forget it.” He wants to leave, but he’s waiting for Rollins to bring him a couple files that he needs. Fin is still scrutinizing him, and he’s starting to wonder just how badly he needs those files.

“There was a kid, few years before you got here. Case got real messy, real fast, and this woman and her girlfriend ended up killing her mother’s rapist. Obviously they couldn’t stick around after that, and the lady had bonded with Liv, so she ended appointing her her kid’s legal guardian without any actual warning. But you know Liv, so she dealt with it and the kid stayed with her for a while until they caught up with the mom. And then of course the mom was pissed because they arrested her, and she transferred the guardianship to Calvin’s-- that’s the kid-- she transferred guardianship to his paternal grandparents. They still stay in touch, Liv and Calvin, as far as I know, but it was hard on her, losing him.”

“I’m sure,” he says, and he’s remembering a day a few months before Barth had received her judicial appointment, when there’d been this _feeling_ between his shoulders. He can’t remember having a single thought about it that wasn’t annoyance, but now he knows what it must have been. “Thank you for telling me.”

“Sure, man.” Fin is giving him the look again, and he spends the few minutes until Rollins brings him his files trying not to squirm.

He really wishes that various members of the SVU team would stop giving him looks that he can’t figure out. He’s got more than enough on his mind already.

\----------------

“Rita sold me out?”

Elana rolls her eyes. “Rita thought you might like to talk to someone who knows what it’s like more than she does. And since Awaziem lives in Arizona, it would be a lot harder for him to corner you in a bar.”

He slides his phone over towards her so she can see the 14 missed calls he has from Devine. “He’s trying his best.”

“I knew I liked him,” she says, sliding the phone back, “So. You want to talk about it?”

“Not particularly, although I get feeling that doesn’t actually matter all that much.”

“Are you going to tell her?”

“If I tell her, the only things that change are things I don’t want to change. Our entire relationship becomes about this one thing.”

“I don’t think you’re giving Sergeant Benson, yourself, or your relationship enough credit if that’s what you’re worried about. Your relationship can be about your marks and everything else you’ve built together at the same time, because whether you knew it or not, they’ve been part of it from the start. They’re a part of _you_.”

“If I tell her, if people know, everything becomes about expectations, about what our relationship should be instead of what it is,” he says, staring into his scotch. Elana doesn’t know as much as Rita and Devine do, but she knows enough.

“Again, I don’t think you’re giving anyone involved enough credit, but…” She sighs. “There’s two moments, when you know someone is your soulmate. There’s the moment where you find out that this person is the one who has been writing all over your skin for all these years, that this is the person the universe picked for you, and you for them. And then there’s the moment where you _decide_ that person is your soulmate, when you look at them and know that they matter to you, that this is a person you want to spend the rest of your life with, however that looks. That’s the moment you decide the universe was right.

“A lot of people forget about or dismiss that second moment in favor of the first, but that decision, it’s important. The fact that you are soulmates doesn’t take anything away from what you and Olivia have, what you’ve built, everything you mean to each other. All it means is that the universe got it right, which isn’t a given. You’re lucky.”

“Then why do I feel like I’m going to be sick?”

Elana laughs. “Because it matters. She matters, and you don’t want to screw it up. You’ve spent your whole life terrified you’re going to screw it up. And now it’s the moment of truth.”

“It doesn’t have to be.”

“You want to wait and see what else to universe has in store? Wouldn’t you rather get to decide?”

“I don’t know what to decide, not really. It’s complicated.” He sighs, and she reaches out to cover his hand with hers. “It’s Olivia.”

“Yeah. One of these days, Barba, you’re going to have to get out of your own damn head. Until then, two things. First, please call Devine back, because I’m pretty sure he will get on a plane if you don’t answer him soon. Second, just personally, I think you should tell her. I think she deserves to know.”

“I don’t necessarily disagree with you.”

\---------------

“My father used to hit my mother. And me. He used to hit the both of us, when I was a kid,” Rafael says, then ducks his head as he takes a drink of his scotch.

Olivia had invited him out for drinks because she needed one, and he’d looked like he’d needed one all week, and she’d thought that maybe if they sat there long enough, he’d talk to her. They’d been there for a half an hour and she’d been just about to give up when he’d spoken.

“That’s why…” He takes another drink.

“That’s why you pulled a 180 on making a deal so quickly. You had a plan, and then Rita said one thing and… It’s happened before too, on cases like this. With Rita, and with other attorneys.”

“Rita… Rita gets under my skin better than anyone else. Except…” He trails off, glancing at her out of the corner of his eyes, and she realizes after a few seconds that what he didn’t say is _you._ Rita Calhoun gets under his skin better than anyone except for _her_.

“Pretty elite company,” she says, and Rafael smiles, but it doesn’t reach his eyes.

“She knows. Rita knows, about my father, and that’s why- She was doing her job, of course, and she wasn’t thinking about my father. No one is ever thinking about my father except for me, and he messed with my ability to do my job on this case.”

“Hey, we did the right thing, remember? And you won the case, which means you convinced the jury that you brought the right charge. Your father didn’t have anything to do with that.”

“Every time we get one of these cases, I think I can just- And every time, it still-”

“Everybody has a past, Rafael. Everybody has things that get to them.” He nods, and she knows he understands, but understanding and accepting are two different things. “Thank you. For telling me. For trusting me.”

He nods again. “I just felt like you should know.”

When he lifts his glass to take another drink, her eyes catch on the maroon marks on his arm.

\--------------

He starts writing again, and she rolls over with a groan, pressing her face into her pillow. It’s not that it’s unpleasant. The problem is in fact that it is entirely _too_ pleasant. She’s had to bite back far too many embarrassing noises in the last hour or so.

She’s going to burn that goddamn notebook.

She’s going to steal it and write down every dirty thought she has ever had about him.

She’s going to try very hard not to think too much about that last thought.

Without lifting her head, she fumbles her phone off of the bedside table.

_OB: Stop working. Go to sleep._

_RB: You don’t want me prepared on this case?_

_OB: I have total faith in your preparation, and the trial doesn’t start for two days. Go to sleep._

_RB: How do you even know I’m still working?_

_Because I’m your soulmate and you’re driving me crazy, and I sent that message because if I didn’t, I was going to send one in about five minutes asking you to come over and touch me for real._

It’s apparently an entire night for thoughts she’s not going to think too hard about.

_OB: I know you, Rafa._

Less damning, but not by all that much.

_RB: Good night, Liv._

She keeps her phone in hand, in case he starts writing again and she has to tell him to knock it off. Or the other thing, the one she’s not thinking about. After ten minutes of nothing, she finally returns it to the table and laces her fingers together over her stomach to keep herself from tracing the new green marks on her hips.

It’s not that she hadn’t ever been affected by those particular marks long before she knew who was making them. And even after she’d known, it hadn’t immediately felt like this, heartbeat heavy and too fast, her breath catching, her whole body desperate for touch, and at first she’d tried to blame it on the fact that there was no one in her bed now, no one to actually touch her, which made her more sensitive to Barba’s phantom touches through the marks. But that argument had run out months ago really, and now she’s just left mostly with the sort of thoughts she tries not to think about too hard.

She hasn’t indulged the desperation yet, either by herself or by actually texting Rafael, but it feels like it’s only a matter of time until the dam breaks. Olivia isn’t sure how she’s going to look him in the eye when that finally happens, which is a problem for more than one reason.

It had been different, since that conversation in her office the day his grandmother had died. _Squabbling with you?_ had been a joke, an attempt to ease the soft and wounded expression off his face, except that she’d known before she’d even finished saying it that she meant it. And there was no denying that _Wouldn’t that be nice_ had made her heart skip a beat.

It wasn’t the sort of thing she’d have ever considered saying to any other coworker, not even Elliot. Even at their most co-dependent, she’d never imagined their partnership as a lifelong thing. She would have gladly given him a kidney if it came to that, but she’d never thought about spending her life as his partner. How it had actually ended had broken her heart, but it had never been something that she assumed would never end. But when she said _Squabbling with you?_ in response to Rafael asking what she thought she’d be doing in three decades, she meant it.

It’s not the sort of thing you say to a coworker, but it is exactly the sort of thing you’re supposed to say to your soulmate. Except she hadn’t been thinking of him as her soulmate in that moment; it’d just been Rafael, sitting in her office looking unsure and guilty and sad, and she’d wanted to make him feel better, make him smile, even if it was just for a minute.

Her fingers slip under the hem of her shirt, tracing along the marks at one hip, and she sighs at the flashes of warmth.

She’s definitely going to steal that notebook. What she does after that is still up in the air.

\--------------

“Do you need to go in?”

“Yeah,” she says, rubbing at her forehead. They’d been doing case prep at her apartment after she’d put Noah to bed for the evening, until Fin had called with a new case. “I need to call Lucy, but this will be the third time this month I’ve called her basically in the middle of the night and-”

“I can stay.”

“What?”

“I can stay,” Rafael repeats, “I’m already here, and you can go without having to worry about calling Lucy. What?” he says, and she works harder to hide her smile.

“Nothing. It’s just that when I asked you to hold him that morning a few weeks ago for about fifteen seconds, you looked like you were afraid he was going to explode.”

“That’s because you-” He makes a motion that seems to indicate that Olivia might have thrown Noah at him, at least in his memory, and she can’t stop herself from laughing. “I’m not totally incompetent with kids, Liv. He’s asleep, so all I have to do is make sure he stays asleep and stay here with him, right? And that means you don’t have to worry, and you don’t have to call Lucy. Let me help you out, Liv.”

“Okay,” she says, surprising herself a little with how quickly she agrees, but she does trust him. “Call me, if you need anything, or if you change your mind.”

“We’ll be good, Liv.”

Olivia isn’t sure what she’s expecting to find when she gets home five hours later. What she had been expecting was a call from him at some point, freaking out or asking her to call Lucy or anything, really, especially since it’s now after three in the morning, but it had never come. She’d been expecting a call, so really the last thing she was expecting was to walk into her apartment to find Rafael asleep, tucked into the corner of her couch with Noah asleep on his chest and _The Very Hungry Caterpillar_ in one hand. Her breath catches in her chest, and Rafael must not be that deeply asleep because the shuddering sound of her exhale is enough to cause him to stir. He blinks at her a few times before he shakes his head to wake himself up.

“Sorry. He woke up and seemed like he was having trouble getting back to sleep, so I thought a book might help.”

“It did,” she says as he shifts so he can pass her sleeping son to her, and he smiles.

“Yeah. I didn’t mean to fall asleep but I closed my eyes for a second and…”

“I know. He’s surprisingly comfortable, isn’t he? Let me just go put him in his crib.”

Once she’s sure Noah is settled, she comes back out into the living room to find him packing up his things.

“You should stay.”

“What?” he asks, a yawn stretching the word out.

“It’s late, and that couch is pretty comfortable. You should stay. I can probably lend you a pair of sweats to sleep in.”

“It’s really not necessary, Liv.”

“Consider it payback, for watching Noah.”

“I volunteered to do that,” he says, yawning again, and she goes into her bedroom to get him the sweatpants. He rolls his eyes when she holds them out to him, but accepts them anyway.

“I have to get up early to get Noah ready for daycare, so I can wake you up in plenty of time to get home and change in the morning. Stay.”

He sighs, but he’s smiling. “Thanks, Liv.”

“Of course, Rafa. I’ll see you in the morning.”

What Olivia wasn’t thinking about when she invited him to stay was walking out into her living room in the morning and seeing Rafael Barba asleep on her couch, furrowed brow smoothed out in sleep, hair messy and falling over his forehead.

 _I could kiss him,_ she thinks as she crosses the room. Not right that moment, of course, but once he was awake and aware, she’s pretty sure she could kiss him and he would kiss her back. She’s fairly certain at this point that that’s how that would go.

Except she can’t just kiss him, because he still doesn’t know they’re soulmates, because she has worked up neither the courage nor a decent plan to tell him that they’re soulmates. She can’t possibly kiss him with a secret like that still between them.

And there’s Noah, and their jobs, and their friendship, all good things but also things that make something that sometimes feels very, very simple much more complicated.

She shakes his shoulder to wake him, and smiles when he blinks up at her.

“Sorry. I didn’t know if you’d remembered to set an alarm, and I wanted to give you time to have coffee before you needed to get home.”

“I did, but this is a much nicer wake-up call,” he says, returning her smile, and she forces herself not to stare at the length of collarbone exposed by his undershirt.

Maybe after Noah’s adoption is finalized, once they’ve made it through Johnny D’s trial, once everything feels more settled, they can sit down and talk and she can finally figure out how to tell him. Maybe then everything won’t be so complicated, and she can let things between them feel as simple as they feel right now.

\--------------

He presses down on her shoulder, trying to ignore just how much blood there is, and Elana groans.

“I know, I know, I’m sorry.”

“That was really stupid of me. I should have at least taken off my damn shoes.”

“It’s not your fault that you got shot.”

“It kind of is. If- if something happens, I need you to tell-”

“You’re going to be fine. You got hit in the shoulder, and you’re not having trouble breathing, which means it didn’t hit your lung, and you’re going to be fine. No last words, or messages from beyond the grave, Elana.”

“You’re going to feel like a real asshole if something goes wrong and you don’t have anything to... tell my loved ones because you didn’t want to... jinx it or some stupid shit like that.”

Rafael grits his teeth. “Fine.”

“Tell the kids that I love them. Tell my siblings… my dad… tell them I’m sorry I didn’t visit more. And tell Dolores… tell Dolores that… I’m glad that she and the universe let me… let me write bad love poems on her arms.”

“Okay. I got it.”

“And Rafael, you should… you should tell her.”

“I said I woul-”

“Not Dolores. Your sergeant. No,” she says when he opens his mouth, “No, you have to listen to me because I’m bleeding all over you. She deserves… she deserves to know. You both do. She deserves to know that the person… the person on the other end of this thing that… that’s been a part of her whole life is someone… someone that matters to her. Somebody she loves.” He ducks his head, concentrating on his hands pressed against her shoulder, even though it turns his stomach. “Rafael, don’t spend your whole life trying to pay for your father’s sins.”

He doesn’t know how to respond to that, so he just concentrates on holding pressure until the paramedics arrive. Everything is in chaos, but after he’s made sure that Elana is on her way to the hospital and Ariel is being looked after, and has given his statement to one of the officers who have arrived on the scene, he manages to slip into a stairwell and make it up to his office without anyone stopping him. It’s only once he’s gotten there that he realizes he’s left his jacket on the table where he’d thrown it as he scrambled to reach Elana. Maybe it’s better that he hadn’t grabbed it, because his hands and wrists are covered in blood.

_Elana’s blood._

Rafael barely makes it to the trash can beside his desk before he throws up.

“You need to go to the hospital?”

He looks up to find Fin standing in the doorway, and shakes his head. “It’s not my blood,” he says, gritting his teeth and swallowing hard against the urge to vomit again.

“Come on then.”

“Where are we going?”

“To the hospital.”

“It’s not my-”

“I know. If it was your blood, I was gonna take you down to one of the ambulances out front, but since it’s not, we’re gonna drive to the hospital so we can find out what’s going on with Amaro and your friend Barth.”

“Oh. Thank you.”

“Of course. Come on, you should wash your hands before we go.”

He almost throws up again in the bathroom, watching the blood wash down the sink, but he’s glad that Fin made him to do it, especially when they walk into the waiting room they’re directed to at Bellevue and Dolores makes a beeline for him.

“Dolores, I-” he starts, but she wraps her arms around his neck before he can say anything else.

“The paramedics said you were the first one to get to her.”

“I- I was closest. I just- How is she?”

“In surgery, but the doctors don’t think it hit anything other than her shoulder. I think they’ll be out with an update in a little bit.” She pulls back to look at him, and he swallows hard, because he really doesn’t want to cry right now.

“Dolores, I’m-” She shifts to place her hand against his cheek, shaking her head.

“You did good, Rafael. You did good.” He nods, lets out a breath that it feels like he’s been holding since Johnny D flipped the table.

He finds a chair to sit in by the wall, since most of the people in the room seem to have too much nervous energy to sit. Every once and awhile, he lifts his head to listen to an update that he doesn’t really hear, and at some point someone pushes a cup of really terrible coffee into his hand, which he drinks mechanically until it’s empty and then just holds on to it. Rafael doesn’t really move much at all until someone rests their hand on his shoulder and he looks up to find Rita sitting in the chair next to him. Most of the people who were in the room when he’d sat down are gone.

“Hey. Dolores and Liv both called me, thought someone should come for you.”

“How’s Elana?”

“Out of surgery, in a room. Dolores and the kids are with her. They’ve got Amaro’s internal bleeding stopped, but his knee’s a mess. They’re still working on it, but…” She trails off before standing. “Come on, you should go home. You’re not doing anybody any good here, and you look like you could use a few drinks and some sleep. Plus you need to call your mother.”

In the cab, once he’s finished assuring his mother that he’s fine and that Elana is recovering, Rafael leans his head back against the seat, closing his eyes against the migraine that’s been pounding at his temples for a few hours now.

“Elana thinks I should tell Liv. That we’re soulmates. She thinks Liv deserves to know. I think maybe she’s right.”

“I agree with her, but you shouldn’t make any life-changing decisions about the soulmate you’re in love with tonight. Tonight, you’re going to have some scotch and then go the fuck to sleep, and I’m going to stay on your couch so that someone’s there when you wake up screaming.”

Rafael wants to argue that he’s a grown man and he can take care of himself, but there’s still blood crusted around his nails where he hadn’t been able to fully scrub it off. He thinks it’s probably a good idea for someone to stay with him, and he’d rather it was Rita than just about anyone else in the world.

He shifts to tilt his head against the cool window and concentrates on his breathing.

\------------

Everyone else has said their goodbyes and gone home, so it’s just Olivia and him, sitting on the couch next to each other while Noah plays with his blocks on the floor by their feet.

“So, how was your first official day of parenthood?” he asks, and Olivia laughs, tilting her head against his shoulder.

“I don’t think there’ll be a party thrown in my honor every day, but it’s been… perfect.”

“Well, I’ll see what I can do about the party thing,” he says, and she digs an elbow gently into his side. He lifts his arm and wraps it around her shoulders.

“I’m sorry,” she says after a few minutes of silence, and he looks down at her where she still has her head on his shoulder, “For making your job harder.”

“You did what you thought you had to do for your son. I’m just sorry about how difficult  it made everything for you. But he’s yours now, Liv. Noah Porter Benson.”

She doesn’t say anything, but he can tell she’s smiling, and she settles more solidly against his side.

He still hasn’t told her. That night after the shooting he’d been so convinced that he was finally ready, except that every day since, he hasn’t told her. Her signature is all over his back again, and he really does think that Elana was right, that Olivia deserves to know. But he still hasn’t told her.

Because he likes being her friend, and her partner, and he likes the place she allows him in her home, with her and Noah. If he tells her, all those things will change, in ways he can’t predict. If he tells her, then the ideal of soulmatehood that he’s always felt destined to screw up is suddenly a part of their relationship. If he tells her, then he has to stop telling himself that they’re just platonic soulmates, just friends and partners, and really confront everything he feels for her.

If he tells her, he might lose things he can’t bear to lose, even if he thinks that she deserves to know, so for now, he’s still working on it, and enjoying this place she’s granted him.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Man, guys, I really didn't think this was gonna take me a whole month. Sorry about that.
> 
> Again, I made up the soulmate system here from a bunch of different pieces of others that I liked with some of my own ideas. If you have any questions about it, or about anything else in the chapter, feel free to ask! I love questions!
> 
> Title of the fic comes from [Each to Each by Penny and Sparrow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRbcttVvAzU), and the chapter title is the caption of [A Softer World #400](http://www.asofterworld.com/index.php?id=400). The book/series that Rafael recommends to Liv is Guards! Guards! by Terry Pratchett, the first book in the Watch series within the greater Discworld series. Y'all should read it. A special thank you to [rosehips](https://archiveofourown.org/users/rosehips) who helped me talk through a couple of points in this chapter that I wasn't totally sure about.
> 
> Chapter 3 will (probably) be between the first two chapters in length, and it (hopefully) will not take me an entire month to write, and I promise that these two crazy kids will finally get their shit together, although not immediately. I've already apologized preemptively on Twitter a few times for the transition between the last scene of this chapter and the first scene of the next one, because it is pretty jarring, but I'll apologize here and when I post that chapter too. If you want to keep up with all my preemptive apologies and other nonsense, you can find me at [@awkspiritanimal](twitter.com/awkspiritanimal) or at [awkwardspiritanimals.tumblr.com](awkwardspiritanimals.tumblr.com)


	3. no word in my mother tongue could explain now what you have done to me

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which our heroes have feelings before, during, and after the Moment of Truth.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> One last sincere apology for the jump in tone between the end of chapter 2 and the start of this one.

He’s jealous. He’s not so deeply in denial about how he feels about her that he can’t identify that that’s what the sour, churning feeling in his gut is, but it’s more than that.

She’s his soulmate, and it’s not that he feels possessive of Olivia, that he feels he has some right to her that Ed Tucker doesn’t. But it’s so much easier to ignore how he feels about her when he can convince himself that they’re platonic soulmates, because being her friend, her partner, having his soulmate in his life and getting to be in hers and having it feel good, feel _right,_ is more than he ever would have imagined, ever could have wished for, will ever feel like he deserves.

But she hadn’t told him about Tucker. She’d kept that from him, personally and professionally, and he doesn’t have any right to her personal life, of course, except that they were supposed to be friends and partners. They _were_ friends and partners, and soulmates, even if Olivia didn’t know that, but she’d kept this from him. She’d only told him once it was too late, and then she’d dropped the information into the middle of everything with a thunk, into their case and their friendship and everything else.

Rafael knows he probably reacted too severely, that she deserved a chance to explain, to defend herself, but _you and I are done talking_ had been the only thing he could force out around the lump in his throat and the tightness in his chest. And God, he knows that it was unfair to report her and Tucker without giving her a heads up, that even though it was necessary, even though he was doing his job, it was petty and mean-spirited to do it without telling her. But he feels petty and mean-spirited and a whole host of other things, and all of them are made worse by the fact that it’s Olivia making him feel these things. They had finally really been getting back to the way they’d been before the whole mess around the Terrence Reynolds shooting, and now there was this.

He’s jealous as hell and angry, at Olivia and Tucker and the whole goddamn universe, for giving him a soulmate in the first place and then having it be her. All he really wants to do is drink until he’s sick, until he feels as miserable physically as he does in his head and he doesn’t have to think about any of it. But the only thing that might fix any of this is to figure out this case, so he finishes the scotch he’s already got in front of him and drops some cash on the bar.

He needs to go see if anybody on Olivia’s squad will talk to him for long enough to solve this case.

\-------------

“What the hell were you thinking?”

Rafael looks up from the papers spread out over the table in front of him and sighs. “It’s not a big deal, Liv.”

“They’re death threats, Barba, of course they’re a big deal.”

“I had it under control.”

“Yeah? You had such a handle on it all that they escalated to threatening you in person.”

“And I handled that. I told Rollins and Carisi, they’re working on it. What more do you want from me, Liv?”

“You should have told _me_ . I’m a police officer, and you’re-” _You’re my soulmate_ \- “We’re friends. We’re friends, and you’ve been getting death threats, and you didn’t tell me. Why the hell didn’t you tell me, Rafael?”

He looks down at the papers in front him, out the windows of his office, anywhere but actually at her. “The threats started after the Terrence Reynolds case. You’ll forgive me for not wanting to bring all of that up with you.” When he finally looks at her, she expects to see snark on his face, or maybe even real anger, but there’s only weariness, like he’s really afraid that the mere mention of their disagreement will start the fight all over again, like they hadn’t figured it out and gotten back to solid ground. Like they didn’t always get back to solid ground with each other.

“Rafa,” she says, sitting in the chair next to him at the table, “Whatever might be going on with us at any given moment, I always want you to be okay. After Dodds…”

“Hey,” he says, shifting his chair closer to hers, “I’m here, Liv. I’m fine.”

She wraps her hand around the arm he’s resting on the table, indulging in the double warmth of his skin and the maroon marks on it. Olivia knows it’s probably selfish and unfair to everyone involved, Tucker and Rafael and herself, but the comfort of it eases some of what has come to feel like perpetual tightness in her chest.

Her relationship with Tucker is good and solid and simple, but the way she feels about him is completely different than how she feels about Rafael. And it’s not just because Rafael is her soulmate, because she’s understood for a long time now that she doesn’t feel all the ways she does about him because he’s her soulmate; he’s her soulmate because of all the ways she feels about him, all the ways he matters to her.

He’s her soulmate, but he doesn’t know that, and he’s also her best friend, which means that telling him might have consequences she can hardly bear to think about, much less actually risk. And now there’s Tucker and Paris and everything that is good and simple about their relationship. And she and Rafael are back on solid ground again.

There’s too much that’s good in her life right now, too much she can’t lose, to take risks on any of it.

\-------------

“Do you ever regret that you and Danny didn’t actually meet sooner? That you spent all those years writing to each other without actually being together?”

Devine laughs. “Sometimes. Days when I’m really feeling my age, I’ll look at him and think about how we could have had this when we were twenty, if we’d wanted. But most days, I know that I wouldn’t change a thing, not when it comes to us. We’ve had a lot of good years, and we had a lot of good years before we’d ever met. Not everybody gets that. We got to build a relationship on our own terms, got to decide what we meant to each other, and we got to fall in love without worrying about how we were supposed to feel about each other or what we were supposed to be. And being soulmates enabled that, but it didn’t make it inevitable. Everything that Danny and I have-- our family, our home, our relationship--, we made. The universe just helped out a little.”

“That sounds like a prepared speech,” Rafael says after a few seconds, and Devine laughs again.

“Rita might have warned me to expect your call.”

“I wish she would stop treating me like I need to be handled.”

“She does it because she loves you, you dingus. And she’s never been through this, and I live in Arizona, which means that we have to tag team as best we can, and you’re stubborn. You want to whine some more about having friends who care about you?”

“Sorry. Although that actually sounded kind of rehearsed too.”

“What can I say, I find you very predictable,” Devine says, but Rafael can hear his grin even over the phone, “You know, you and Olivia are pretty lucky.”

“Because I’m predictable?”

“Because you get to decide what being soulmates means within the framework of what you already have, and most people have to do things the other way around. And don’t get me wrong, plenty of them figure everything out and have great relationships, but they don’t get to have what you and Olivia do, don’t get to know that they matter to their soulmate before they know that the universe thinks so too.”

“Elana said some of the same things. About us being lucky.”

“All these smart people who know what they’re talking about in your life telling you you’re being an idiot and you still can’t get your shit together.”

Rafael really, really wishes he had a decent response to that.

\-------------

“You don’t need to get home to Noah?” he asks, and Olivia shakes her head as she slides into the booth across from him.

“Lucy is taking him to a movie.”

“You didn’t want to take the opportunity to spend some time with Tucker?”

It should be biting. She wishes it was biting, instead of almost completely devoid of any emotion at all. Olivia knows how to deal with annoyed Rafael, whether it’s playful or not, and they’d both moved past their anger about how he’d found out about her relationship with Tucker months ago, but she has no idea what to do with the carefully controlled blankness on his face and in his voice. Especially now that it’s not necessary, and hasn’t been for weeks.

Her whole squad knows, and she’d sat Noah down a few days after the break up to explain that Tucker wouldn’t be around like he had been as well as she could to a four-year-old, but she hasn’t told Rafael, even though it’s been weeks. As recently as a year ago, she would have spent a lot of time convincing herself that it was for no other reason than that it hadn’t come up, but now she doesn’t even bother trying.

She hasn’t told him because as long as she was with Tucker, or Rafael thought she was with him, then she had a very good excuse not to tell him that they were soulmates. It wouldn’t be fair to anyone involved to tell him then, and it gave her a reason to hold on to the secret beyond her own fears, something solid to focus on whenever he looked at her in that certain way of his and her heart jackrabbitted in her chest, desperate to tell him. Even if she was able to convince herself that they are platonic soulmates-- and she hasn’t won that argument with herself in months--, it still isn’t something she can tell him when she’s with someone else, not when she’s held her tongue at every opportunity for years now.

But she’s not going to lie to him about it.

“We broke up. A few weeks ago.”

“Oh. I’m sorry.”

It’s exactly the same thing he’d said when she told him she’d broken up with Brian years ago, and she can’t help her laugh. “You’re not exactly his biggest fan.”

“No, but you liked him, and he’s a good man. And he made you happy. That’s what matters.”

_You make me happy. You make me happy, and my kid adores you, and the other day I had to be thankful that your desk was between us because you tipped your head back against your chair and all I wanted to do was press my mouth against the hollow of your throat. I’m not sure what it is that’s holding me back anymore, except that I think that being soulmates might really be making everything a lot harder._

“He wanted to retire, move somewhere quiet. Wanted me to go with him.”

“You thought about it?”

“For a couple of days. I guess. It was never really… This job… My work here isn’t finished.”

“Will it ever be?”

“I don’t know. Maybe someday I’ll feel like I’ve found enough people who will keep doing it once I’m gone. Maybe I’ll just get fed up one day and move somewhere tropical with Noah. I don’t know,” she says, and he nods in understanding, “What I do know is that day isn’t today. There’s too much here, too many people, in this city and in this job, that I’m not ready to leave behind.”

Rafael smiles, warm and soft and open, and Olivia wonders if getting to see that particular expression will ever stop feeling like such a privilege. She hopes not.

\--------------

“Uncle Rafa?”

“What’s up, buddy?”

He and Olivia had been working in the kitchen while Noah colored and listened to music on her iPad, headphones secured over his ears, but when she’d taken a call from Rollins and retreated into her bedroom with the door closed, Rafael had settled on the couch to wait and Noah had clambered up next to him, coloring book in tow.

“Are your colors like Momma’s?” he asks, and it takes Rafael a second to realize he’s asking about his soul marks.

“Yeah, they are. Has your mom, uh, told you about her colors?” He doesn’t want to lie to Noah, or seem like he’s hiding anything from him, but he also isn’t sure how much Olivia has told him or wants him to know about soulmates. He is only four, after all, but Noah nods.

“She says they’re how you know who your soulmate is. You’ve got a lot more than Momma does.”

“That just means my soulmate writes more than hers does.”

“Oh.” He seems to consider this, rearranging a couple of his crayons. “Can I touch them? Momma says that hers make a noise when I touch them. Like this,” he says, blowing a soft raspberry to illustrate, and Rafael can’t help grinning as he nods. Noah rests a small hand against his forearm and the sound of fluttering pages fills his ears as the boy looks up at him expectantly. He reaches out and picks up Noah’s coloring book so he can run his thumb over the corner next to his ear.

“It sounds like that.”

“Cool. Do you want to color with me?” he asks, taking the book back and offering several crayons to him.

They’ve been working for awhile when Olivia finally emerges, and at the look on her face, Rafael leans over to Noah.

“Hey, buddy, you keep working, I’ve got to talk to your mom.” She’s waiting for him in the kitchen, checking her phone. “You need to go in?”

“Just for a little while.”

“I can stay.” He’s watched Noah plenty of times before, but it’s always been either late at night once Noah is already in bed or for a few hours in the afternoon, when he usually just has to sit on the couch while Noah watches cartoons and plays with his toys. But now it’s almost dinner time, and there’s still a few hours until he’ll need to go to sleep.

“Are you sure? I can call Lucy.”

“Positive, Liv. I can make him dinner if you’ve got something here he’ll eat.”

“There’s mac and cheese, or you can order something. He’ll eat spaghetti, or chicken nuggets.”

“I think I can handle mac and cheese. We’ll be good.”

Olivia sighs, but he knows it has a lot more to do with whatever Rollins had called about than anxiety about leaving Noah with him. After a few seconds, she takes a deep breath, steeling herself with a smile as she moves into the living room and squats down next to Noah.

“Hey, sweet boy. I’ve got to go into work, but Uncle Rafa is going to stay with you and make you dinner. Be good for him, okay?”

“Okay. We can color some more.”

“Sounds like a plan,” Rafael says, and Olivia smiles at both of them before leaning over to press a kiss against Noah’s head. He walks her to the door, and he breathes through the shuddering in his chest when she reaches out to touch his arm.

“Thanks, Rafa.”

“Of course. Keep me updated, and I’ll see you when you get back.”

She texts while he’s dishing up Noah’s macaroni and cheese to say that she’ll be later than she thought and that she can still text Lucy, but he responds that he thinks he’s seen her put Noah to bed enough that he can handle it. Despite the reassurance, he’s a little nervous, but Noah goes easily enough once he’s negotiated for a couple extra stories.

“Rafa?” he says through a yawn once Rafael has finished the last book and pulled the blankets up to his chin.

“Yeah?”

“Do you love your soulmate?”

“What?” he asks, even though he’d heard him just fine. His heart is suddenly beating so fast it’s almost painful.

“Momma says that sometimes people love their soulmates. Do you love yours?”

There’s no ulterior motive behind the question, he reminds himself, because Noah is four, and even if he wasn’t, he has no reason to suspect that his mother and Rafael’s soulmate are one and the same.

He doesn’t want to lie, either to Noah or about this.

“Yeah, I do. I love her very much.” It feels good to say it out loud.

“Okay,” Noah says, and then he hugs his stuffed elephant closer, shifting to get comfortable, “Night, Uncle Rafa.”

“Good night, Noah. Dulces sueños, mijo.”

He’s just closing the door behind him when the front door opens and Olivia comes in, dropping her purse and keys on the hall table.

“Hey, I just finished reading to him, you can probably say good night,” he says, and his heart, still returning to its normal rhythm, skips a beat when she smiles at him. While she ducks into the room to talk to her son, he starts to pack up the files they’d been working on earlier.

“We can work on those some more, if you want,” she says, coming back out into the living room, and he shakes his head.

“Nothing that can’t wait until tomorrow.”

“You want to stay for a drink then? I won’t even try to fill you in on the case we just caught.”

“You can if you want,” he says, but it’s her turn to shake her head.

“I just want to have a drink with my friend. Wine alright?” she asks, and he nods as she retrieves two glasses and the bottle, “You’re a hit, by the way. And you washed the dishes. It’s a shame you can’t be here every night.”

The Bensons are really showing a blatant disregard for his heart rate tonight, and he’s pretty sure that Olivia is actually blushing faintly as she pours the wine and slides one glass over to him.

“He made it easy. Um, he asked about my marks earlier, before you left. I answered his questions, and he said you’d talked to him about yours, but I thought you might want to know.”

“Yeah, he likes to ask questions about mine. He likes the color, and that they make noise even if he can’t hear it. I’ve tried my best to explain the whole concept, but it’s a tricky thing to get a four-year-old to understand. I’m sorry if he made you uncomfortable, I didn’t even think about-”

“No, no, he’s fine. He’s great. I just thought you would want to know he’d asked, in case he brings it up.”

“Thank you. And thanks again for staying with him.”

“Of course, Liv. Any time.”

He wishes he could find the words to explain how much it means to him that she trusts him to watch her son, how much it means that Noah likes him. Until he finds them, until he can say the things he needs to say out loud, he thinks it might be enough just to lean against the counter next to her in her quiet kitchen, shoulders brushing as they drink their wine.

\-----------------

“We don’t really have that much work on this case, do we?” she asks, eyeing the milk crate in his hands, his briefcase balanced on top, and he laughs.

“No, don’t worry. This is actually a gift for Noah.”

“You didn’t need to buy him anything,” Olivia says, stepping out of the way to let him into the apartment.

“I didn’t. Or at least not recently. And actually my mother bought most of these,” he explains, setting the box on the table and lifting up his briefcase to show the stack of books inside.

Olivia smiles. “Noah, come see what Uncle Rafa brought you.”

Noah makes a beeline for the box as soon as he spots it, lifting out as many books as he can get his hands around once he reaches the table.

“What do you say?” Olivia says, reaching down to help her son get a better grip.

“Thank you,” Noah says, turning to hold the stack out to Rafael, “Will you read some? Please?” he adds in response to a look from his mother.

“If it’s alright with your mom.”

“Of course.”

When he emerges from Noah’s room a little while later, Olivia is sitting on the couch, looking through the remaining books in the crate.

“He fell asleep, hope that’s okay.”

“I was hoping he’d take a nap. How many books did he make you read before he drifted off?”

“Four, but he let me pick the last one.”

“He’s very generous like that,” she says with a laugh, “And this is a very generous gift.”

He shrugs. He’d wanted to do something after the Nicole Keller case, something that would comfort and reassure her after that particular nightmare of a trial, but nothing had felt right until he’d thought of this.

“I told you, I’ve never gotten rid of a single book I’ve ever owned. These were just sitting around in their boxes, figured someone should get some use out of them. There’s more, if you want them.”

“I think these will be enough to keep him occupied for a while, but I’d never say no to more books.”

Rafael nods, but he’s only half listening. Olivia has opened the cover of one of the books, and suddenly he’s looking both at the initials he’d written clumsily in blue crayon when he was eight or nine and the faint line of his initials up her right arm, reflections of the ones he’d written in the books he’d gotten for Christmas. His gut twists, and he can’t tell if it is because he wants her to notice or he doesn’t.

“I loved these as a kid,” Olivia says, and he shakes himself out of his thoughts as she closes the cover again so he can read _Encyclopedia Brown Saves the Day_.

He can’t help his smile. “I’m astonished. Absolutely flabbergasted.”

“Like it’s any less telling about you. They’re your books, after all.” Her own smile is soft and teasing all at once. “You’re a little like Encyclopedia. Always noticing things everyone else misses.”

“Does that make you Sally Kimball?”

“Tough _and_ smart?”

“Sounds exactly right.”

She rolls her eyes at him, but her smile is now fond and exasperated in equal measure, and he wonders when he got so good at that, reading everything on her face. He can’t remember now a time it hadn’t felt like that, even back at the beginning when their words clashed more often than not, like he had an understanding of her and her of him that stretched beyond the things they actually said to each other.

“It’s probably better that Noah will have your copies instead of mine, if I’d kept them. I marked mine up all over, looking for clues, writing out theories.”

He just barely stops himself from saying _I know_.

“I think he’d appreciate that, in its own way,” he says instead, and her smile spreads into a grin, the full, bright one that he doesn’t get to see all that often, and not nearly as often as he’d like, not by a longshot. For a few seconds in the light of that grin, everything in him comes to a sudden and complete stop, like every bit of him needs to concentrate on soaking in her joy, with himself and her son and a milk crate full of books at its center.

He was definitely going to have to bring more books over, for Noah and for the chance to inspire that particular grin of Olivia’s.

\--------------

It’s the most natural thing in the world, to press her hand to her heart.

He looks back at her, face full of fear and determination and grief and pride, and every word she could possibly say gets stuck in her throat, heavy and thick, so she lifts her hand and presses it over her heart. Rafael’s entire face goes soft, just for a moment, all of his emotions still there but lessened somehow, like with that one gesture she’d dropped a wall between him and the world, just for a few seconds.

She wishes there was more she could do, but maybe those few moments are enough. Maybe it’s enough that he knows that she would do whatever she could, and even when there is nothing left to do, she is still on his side. That if their situations had been reversed, she would trust him to stand by her in the same way. They have each other’s backs, and it feels more urgent than ever that he understands the full extent of that.

It’s always been important to tell him, and that importance was what made it so hard to actually do it, what had tied her tongue all these years. But it feels urgent now, because if the worst comes to pass, if they really have seen their last case together, she needs him to understand all the ways he is important to her, including this. Olivia needs him to know how much he matters to her, and that the universe agrees.

All those years she’d felt connected to her soulmate, she never could have predicted everything that Rafael means to her, but she wants him to understand those years, wants him to understand the fullness of their connection. She wants him to understand, so that he can help her to understand those years too, what it is that scares him so much about all of this.

But all of that is for later, when there’s more time. For now, there’s her hand on her heart, and all the things they both know.

\--------------

“How is Lieutenant Benson? Does she know about your suspension?”

His mother’s disapproval had radiated off her as he’d explained what had happened, but all she’d actually said was that he’d have more time to visit her over the next month.

“Of course she does, Ma. We work together. I called her yesterday evening to tell her.”

“You made a special call just for her?”

“She’s the commanding officer of the unit I work with. Don’t make anything more out of it.”

She rolls her eyes, taking another plate from him to dry. “Far be it for a mother to care about her son’s soulmate.”

Rafael looks up from the sink sharply. “How did you-? Did Rita-?”

Another eyeroll. “Please, you think I need your friends to tell me about your soulmate?”

“How- You’ve met her maybe five times.”

“And I’ve listened to you talk about her for five years. Do you think I don’t pay attention when you talk?”

“Of course you do, Mami, but-”

“Rafi, when you talk about her, you touch your arms. Your marks. Not every time, and who knows if you do it anywhere else, but here? You talk about her, and you touch your arms. I know about soulmates, mijo, and I know it when I see it when it comes to my son.” He works at a particularly stubborn bit on the plate in his hands, and can sense his mother studying him. “I’ve never seen anything scare you, mijo.”

“That’s not true,” he says, before he can stop himself.

“Yes, well, they go hand in hand, don’t they?” she sighs, and Rafael looks up sharply for the second time in about that many minutes. They don’t talk about his father, and on the rare occasions where Rafael slips up, usually in anger, his mother all but actually shuts down until he changes the subject again. “Rafi, you and Olivia are nothing like that.”

“I know that. I just… If I tell her, I go from being her best friend to the person that ignored her for most of our lives.”

“You think she’ll be upset that her best friend is also her soulmate? You can’t go back and change anything that’s already happened, but you do get to decide what happens next. That’s the only thing you can control.”

He swallows hard against all the emotions stuck in his throat, and after a few seconds, his mother’s hand comes up to rub his back. It doesn’t actually fix anything at all, but it’s comforting all the same.

\--------------

Rafael is four weeks and three days into his suspension, and he’s spent more evenings at her apartment than not. They’ve taken turns cooking dinner, and he plays with Noah, has taken over bedtime stories at Noah’s insistence, and he usually hangs around after for a few drinks or just to sit on the couch with her and talk. Or read, which is what they’re doing now.

It’s very much something she finds herself getting used to, that she wants more of, although she hasn’t figured out quite how to tell him that yet.

She reaches forward to snag a pen off the coffee table to underline a passage she likes, and doesn’t realize exactly what she’s doing until she hears his sharp intake of breath, feels him tense next to her. She turns just in time to watch the maroon lines appear on his forearm, but Rafael hasn’t moved, still staring down at his book, and after a few seconds Olivia realizes he’s not going to, that he’s going to try his best to act like nothing happened.

A month ago she might have let him get away with it, considered it a bullet dodged after a moment of absent-mindedness. But that was before _we might have seen our last case together_ , before he’d spent more time at her apartment than not, hanging out with her kid and making dinner and smiling at her softly from the other end of her couch, head tilted against the back because he’d stayed late enough that both of them were starting to doze off.

She looks away from him, but only long enough to write _Rafa_ across the top of the page, and she looks back in time to see him close his hand over the maroon letters on his palm.

“Liv,” he says, barely glancing at her, and she remembers the first time she’d ever asked him about his soulmate, the first time she’d ever seen his face go soft like it is now. Soft and afraid but not-

“You don’t seem surprised.”

“No. You don’t either.”

She shakes her head. “How long have you known?” She’s been waiting to tell him all this time, trying to figure out some way to tell him that would ease his fears instead of making them worse, but now the moment of truth has arrived with no plan on her part and no surprise on his.

“Since right after you adopted Noah.” God, they’ve wasted _years_. “And you?”

“The Muñoz case. That afternoon I came over to your apartment.”

He finally looks at her, and even though it’s only for a few seconds, she can see the fear in his eyes. Olivia shifts to put her book on the table and reach out to him, but he presses himself back further into the corner of the couch.

“Rafa.”

“Nothing has to change,” he says, and she pulls back unconsciously.

“What do you mean?”

“We’ve both known for a long time. Nothing has to change just because we’re now aware that we both know.”

“What if we want things to change? What if we both want the same thing?” she says, worrying that maybe she’d been imagining things this whole time, that she loved him and wanted him so much that she’d misread every sign so that she could assume he felt the same way.

And then his face does something complicated and halting, hopeful and wanting and terrified all at once, and her heart swells and cracks simultaneously. He’s still pressed back into the corner of the couch, looking like he could bolt at any moment.

“Liv, it’s- Maybe we should take a few days and think about things.”

She can’t help the disbelieving laugh that escapes her. “A few days? Rafa, how much more thinking is there left to do? We’ve both apparently spent years thinking about it. We have to actually talk about it at some point.”

“It’s not that easy.”

“Why the hell not?” she asks, annoyance bubbling over. She’s known how scared he is of this almost as long as she’s known anything, but it’s no longer a hypothetical. “It’s me, Rafa.”

“I’m well aware of that, Liv.” She wants to ask him what he means by that, but she’s pretty sure she already knows.

“We need to talk, even if it’s just to-” _To make sure things stay the same._ She can’t bring herself to actually say it, not when just the thought of it makes her heart ache. “We need to talk about this.”

Rafael closes his eyes, swallows hard. When he speaks, his voice shakes.

“I know. I know, I just-”

_Talk to me. Explain it to me, whatever it is that makes you so afraid of this. Explain it to me, so we can be together in this like we’re together in everything. I’m on your side. Let me be on your side._

“Liv-” He reaches out towards her, but she shakes her head. If he touches her, she won’t be able to do what she needs to do.

“A few days. That’s what you need? And then we can sit down and talk? Really talk?” After a few seconds, he nods. “Okay. A few days then.”

\-----------------

She really should have set a firmer deadline, because a few days has stretched into a week.

All the ways she had imagined things would unfold after they both knew, good and bad, and she’d never considered this sort of limbo as an option. Of course, she’d never imagined that he also already knew and hadn’t told her, which she can now recognize as ridiculous in its own right, but still.

She’d thought they’d talk or yell or embrace or _something_ , anything except this strange stalemate they’ve settled in to. He doesn’t seem to be avoiding her, which she’d half expected, and he’d seemed happy enough to see her when she’d brought him her gift to welcome him back, but he can’t seem to really bring himself to look at her either. They haven’t been in a situation where she really felt they could talk about things since that last evening in her apartment. Noah keeps asking when Uncle Rafa is going to come over again, and she’s sure the squad has figured out that something is up.

Olivia doesn’t know what exactly she was expecting when all of this finally came to a head, but it certainly wasn’t this.

“Hey, Lieu,” Carisi says, knocking on the doorframe, “I’ve got those reports you needed.”

“Thanks.” She adds it to the pile already on her desk, and looks up at the detective as he continues to fidget in front of her. “Did you need something else?”

“Nah, nah. It’s just- You know, plenty of people have soulmates and have long, happy relationships with people that aren’t them. Happens all the time. And you and Barba have got a double dose, I know, but if anybody can handle that, it’s you guys. You’re-”

She laughs, unable to help herself. He’s just so earnest, in that particular way only Carisi can manage. “I appreciate the concern, Carisi, but that’s pretty much the exact opposite of the problem.”

It takes him a few seconds to understand, but then he manages his own laugh, rubbing at the back of his neck. “Oh, well, that’s good then. I’ll, uh, let you get back to work.” When he leaves, she notices Fin watching them from his desk with a knowing look, and she’s not surprised when he sits down in front of her a couple minutes later.

“You using Carisi as your messenger now?”

Fin shrugs. “He’s been bugging Rollins and me all week about whether he should say something. I might have given him a little nudge.”

“And what do you think?”

He’s the only person she’s ever told. They’ve only talked about it a handful of times in all the years since, but much more important to Olivia was the knowledge that when she did need to talk about it, he was always there. And she knows he’d looked out for Barba too, more than he otherwise might have, because he was Olivia’s soulmate and because he mattered to her.

“Same thing I’ve always thought. Not talking about it doesn’t do either of you any good.”

For all the terror churning in her gut, she knows he’s right, and a part of her has always agreed with him. Rafael had asked for a few days and she’d given him a week because she was scared of what might change, but with every passing day it is becoming clearer and clearer that things are going to change anyway, and if she doesn’t talk to him the only changes will be ones she doesn’t want.

“Can you-?”

Fin’s nod cuts off the question as he laughs. “We’ll hold down the fort. Go get your man, Liv.”

She laughs even as she rolls her eyes, and lets Fin’s faith bolster her own shaky hopes.

\--------------

Rafael leans back against his desk, left hand pressed over his eyes, right still clenched at his side.

He’d been making his closing argument, had gestured over at the defendant with an open hand. When he’d turned back, most members of the jury had been staring not at where he’d pointed but at the maroon letters on his palm, and he’d stumbled over his words as his heart gave a too heavy thud. At least he’d managed to get the guilty verdict, but he hasn’t managed to get his hands to stop shaking since.

He drops his hand with a sigh, and finds Olivia standing in the doorway, as though the incident had somehow summoned her.

“Did you need something for a case?” he asks, but it’s a weak attempt at redirection considering she’s already closing the door behind her.

“We need to talk.”

“Here?”

“Less likely that you’ll run away.”

He considers it for a few seconds anyway, but Olivia is still standing in front of the now closed door, so instead he settles more comfortably against his desk and crosses his arms over his chest. Once she’s apparently sure that he’s staying where he is, she moves further into his office.

“Talking about it should probably involve actual speech at some point,” she says, after they’ve stared at each other in silence for a minute. Or rather, Olivia has stared at him and he’s stared at a spot just to her left.

“I don’t know what you want me to say.”

“Anything, Barba. I want you to explain to me- I think I was pretty clear the other night about how I feel and what I want, but you haven’t said anything except that things don’t have to change.”

“They don’t.” _What if we both want the same thing?_ His heart had lept at her words, but the only thing outweighing his joy in that moment had been his terror.

“Why the hell not?”

“Liv, it’s- it’s complicated.” _It’s not_ , says a voice in his head that sounds like Rita and Devine and Elana and his mother all at once. _Tell yourself all you want that the others can’t really understand, but your mother knows all about it, this thing you claim is so complicated, and she still believes._

“Rafa, if it’s- if you-” He can see her fighting to keep her pain from showing on her face, and he crosses his arms more tightly against his chest to keep from reaching out to her. “If I misread, if you don’t… feel the same way then-”

“You didn’t. I swear, Olivia, it’s not that.” This would all probably be easier if he could just say it was, but he can’t. Rafael might not be able to bring himself to tell her the entire truth of it, but he won’t lie to her about his feelings, can’t let her think that he doesn’t adore her, that she doesn’t matter to him. That’s part of the problem, really.

“Is it this, then?” she asks, gesturing around his office, “Because there are ways to deal with that. Procedures, paperwork, we could figure it-”

“It’s you,” he says, forcing himself to actually look at her for the first time since she’d appeared in his doorway, “I can’t lose you, Liv. You’re my best friend, and if we change things, even if it’s what we both want… I’ll fuck it up, and it’ll wreck things between us. I could give up everything else, if I had to, but I can’t risk you and Noah.”

“That’s a pretty strange place to start a relationship, right at the end.” For the first time since he’d met her, Rafael wishes he couldn’t read her so well, because all her anger and sadness and fear is right there on her face. “So what, you’re just going to what? Shut down and shut me out until I stop feeling this way? Until you do?”

“Of course not. That’s the opposite- What we have now is good, Liv. It’s solid ground, and we don’t have to change that, don’t need to feel obligated to change that, just because we both understand the whole situation now.” _She doesn’t understand, because you won’t tell her. That’s as close as you’ve come and you’re still miles away._

“Solid ground, Rafa?” She laughs, but it’s a pained sound, and he winces. “You’ve barely been able to look at me all week. You really think that’s better than trying? At taking a chance on something we both want, that we _know_ we both want?”

He wishes he could explain, could comfort her, could even bring himself to look at her, and his heart creaks in his chest under the weight of it all. She’s so brave, fearless Liv, and the fact that he’s too much of a coward to even talk to her, to try to help her understand rather than just asking her to, is one of the reasons he doesn’t deserve her, no matter how much he wants her.

“Okay. Okay, then I think… maybe we should take a few days again. I just need to… adjust. And then we can… then we’ll be fine,” Olivia says, her voice brittle.

 _Fine_ pulls at something in his gut, and God, adjusting is the last thing he wants. He just wants the easy camaraderie back, and the tension that’s been there for so long that it’s almost comfortable. He wants to be brave enough to try. He wants her, all of her, the entire package.

He _wants, wants, wants_ , but Rafael lets her cross to the door without a word, because he doesn’t know what else he could say.

Olivia stops with her hand on the door, and it’s like he can actually see what she’s about to do in his head. Which means he could stop it, could step around his desk to put it between them or grab something off of it to give his hands something to do. Instead all he does stand and drop his arms to his side as she turns back and steps into his space. He should move, step away and put some distance between their bodies, but he’s held in place by her gaze, determined and hopeful and nervous all at once.

“Rafa,” she breathes, and he understands that she’s still giving him a choice, that she’s made hers but he can still make his, can still back away and she’ll respect that, she’ll turn and leave and something will have changed between them irrevocably whether he wants it to or not. But they’ll both have gotten to make a choice.

And he could step back, break eye contact and step away from her. As hard as his heart is beating, as much as everything in him is straining to get closer to her, he could do it. Everything he’s just said, every reason he’s given and the ones he couldn’t give voice to, means he should step back. Except that Olivia Benson is standing so close their breaths mingle, eyes on his, and everything else falls away.

Rafael nods, just once, and Olivia lifts a hand to the back of his neck as she leans in to kiss him. It’s almost chaste for a few moments, like she’s waiting for him to realize what’s happening and pull away, but then she presses her tongue against his lower lip and he opens his mouth to her, reaching for her waist to pull her closer. Her hand slides up into his hair.

Eventually, Olivia pulls back with a shuddering breath, but only far enough to rest her forehead against his. For several long minutes the only sounds in the room are the coffee maker and their heavy breathing, and he makes no move to distance himself from her.

Then she says, voice thick, “What the hell are we going to do now?”

And he knows exactly what she means, because it had been a nearly impossible task to refuse her before, but now that he knows what it’s like to kiss her? To feel the curve of her waist underneath his palm and to have her fingers threaded through the hair at the back of his head? He’d been able to hide behind his terror that everything would go wrong because that terror only existed because of how much he loved her, how much she meant to him.

But now things have changed. Olivia had changed them, and so had he.

The fear is still there, rattling around in his chest, but it feels small now, with no chance at holding back all the love he feels in this moment, rushing through his body with each too heavy beat of his heart. Rafael is helpless against the urge to sway into her once again and catch her mouth with his, and the soft sound she makes, the way she presses back against him, makes him feel lit up from each point of contact between them-- their mouths, her hand in his hair, his at her waist.

When they part this time, Olivia doesn’t open her eyes, like she’s afraid of what she’ll see on his face if she does, and he lifts one hand to brush his thumb across her cheekbone gently.

“Liv,” he says, and after a few seconds she finally meets his eyes, “Sometimes- sometimes the universe gets it right, yeah? I can’t- I don’t- Maybe-”

She kisses him this time, softly and quickly, catching his upper lip between hers.

“Rafael, I need you to understand. I’m choosing you. Whatever the universe thinks, good or bad, whatever these mean-” Her hand trails down his neck, across his shoulder, along his arm until her fingers brush against the maroon marks on his skin, her voice momentarily accompanied by the shuffle of turning pages near his heart- “I’m choosing you. I chose you as my partner in all of this,” she says, gesturing around his office, “And I chose you as my friend. My best friend. And I’m choosing you again, choosing us, but I need- I need you to choose me too.”

“I always choose you, Liv,” he says, and her fingers twist into his shirt at his waist, where she’s slipped her hand underneath his jacket, “I just- Can I come over tonight? Make dinner for you and Noah? And then we can talk.”

She hesitates, and if she really wants to talk about it right now, he will, but he’d rather not continue to have this conversation in his office. Would rather give them both a little time to think and to breathe, neither of which he feels particularly capable of with his forehead resting against hers.

But after a few seconds, she nods. “Seven?”

“I’ll see you then. Wait,” he says, when she starts to step away from him, and she smiles, the first real smile he’s seen on her face since that evening on her couch last week. Olivia crowds back into his space and kisses him again, long and slow.

She’s still smiling when they break apart. “See you tonight, Rafa.”

He just barely resists the urge to pull her back to him again.

\-------------

Noah monopolizes the conversation during and after dinner, which Rafael can’t help but be grateful for. Not that he thought Olivia would immediately ambush him, but the familiarity of Noah chattering away while his mother keeps reminding him not to talk with his mouth full soothes something in his soul. It’s when Noah is going through his week for the second time while they wash the dishes so he can make sure he didn’t miss anything he thinks his Uncle Rafa needs to know that Rafael realizes he can’t remember the last time he’d gone seven days without seeing him, and the fact that that doesn’t terrify him like he thought it would makes him grin.

He manages to negotiate Noah down to two bedtime stories, even though he tries to claim that he owes him six or seven. Olivia is waiting for him in the kitchen when he finishes, sipping at her wine and holding out a tumbler of scotch. He leans against the counter next to her and they drink in silence for a few minutes.

“I really think it’s your turn to say something first,” she says, and he takes another sip of scotch to fortify himself.

“Why didn’t you write to your soulmate?” he asks, turning his head to look at her, “All those years, you only reached out once, even though you wanted to know. You wanted to talk.” He’s not sure how he knows that she’d wanted that, but he doesn’t have any doubts that it’s true.

“Growing up, my house was… I never knew what I was going to wake up to, what I’d come home to. Having a place like that be home, well, you know. There wasn’t a lot of stability there. But my soulmate, they were always there. Even if they weren’t writing _to_ me, they never stopped writing. I always got to have a little piece of them, through everything, and I didn’t want to risk that by pushing. I liked knowing there was someone out there that was connected to me, even if we never met, never talked. I didn’t want to risk that trying to force my soulmate into doing something they didn’t want to do, something they weren’t comfortable with. Something you weren’t comfortable with.”

He knows why she’s finally switched to talking about him directly, knows what she’s asking without actually saying it, giving him one last out if he wants it. But she deserves to know, after all these years and everything they’ve been through, and she needs to know, if they’re going to move forward together. And more than anything, he knows he can trust her with it, because it’s Olivia and she’s his soulmate and she’s protected it for years without ever knowing it.

Rafael sets his glass down on the counter, because his hands are starting to shake, and Olivia sets hers next to it.

“My parents were soulmates. And in that time, in the place they were, that was… your soulmate was the person God had chosen for you. Once you knew, once people knew, you didn’t have very many options. So they got married young, they had me when they were young, and, well, I’ve told you about my father. One of my earliest memories is sitting on the floor of our kitchen and looking up at my mother at the stove. There was a bruise on her arm in the shape of a handprint, and over that were her marks. I didn’t even really understand what those were yet, but I knew that the same person was responsible for both, and I knew that that wasn’t how things were supposed to be. And…”

He’d shed his jacket and tie before dinner, and as he falters, she hooks a hand under his nearer suspender and tugs. He lets himself be pulled, turns to stand in front of her so she can hook one arm around his neck and he can slide his around her waist, drop his face down against her shoulder.

“Elana and Rita are always telling me that I can’t spend my life trying to make up for my father’s sins,” he says, and Olivia’s arms tighten around him, “They say I deserve to be happy.”

“You do. We do.” She leans back to meet his eyes. “I think we deserve each other.”

Rafael ducks his head, and she shifts so she can push back the hair falling into his face. “I think you probably deserve a better soulmate.”

“Hey.” She traces the line of his jaw and lifts his chin, smiling. “I’m perfectly happy with the soulmate I’ve got.” She hesitates for a moment, then leans in to press her lips against his softly. He shifts a little closer, presses her more firmly against the counter behind her as he kisses her back. “All I wanted was for my soulmate to keep buying books and writing his initials in them, so you did pretty good. And all of this exceeds my wildest dreams.”

Ducking his head to press a line of kisses down the side of her neck with a smirk, he says, “Surely not _all_ your wildest dreams.”

She laughs, tugging on his hair to get him to lift his head as her other hand re-establishes its grip on his suspender.

“Well, most of those are about Rafael Barba,” she says, shifting so that their hips are better aligned, and he bites back a groan, “The fact that you’re my soulmate is just a bonus. I’m choosing you, remember?”

“Remind me,” he answers, then kisses her before she can do or say anything else.

She responds eagerly, and he tugs at her blouse, freeing it from her waistband so he can slide a hand underneath to find the warm skin of her hip, spreading his fingers to touch as much of her as he possibly can. He’s so caught up in her, the feel of her against him and the soft noises of approval she makes when he ducks his head to kiss her neck again that he doesn’t notice that the warmth under his palm isn’t constant. Instead, it flutters to the same beat as her pulse under his lips.

When he pulls back, she’s grinning and wide-eyed. At her nod, he lifts the hem of her shirt far enough to see the green handwriting across her hips. _His handwriting._ Rafael traces over it with his thumb and hears Olivia’s breath catch.

“I didn’t know…”

“I know. I’ll tell you about it later?”

“Later?” he asks, and she shifts out from between him and the counter. He only has a few moments to mourn the loss before she pulls him back against her by his suspenders as she takes a step down the hall towards her bedroom.

“Later?” Her eyes are dark, and there’s a pink flush down down her neck and chest that he’d really like to see more of.

“Later,” he breathes against her lips.

\----------------

He’s wearing just the sweatpants he’d borrowed that first night he’d stayed with Noah, and watching the play of muscles across his shoulders as he traces over the green soul marks across her hips and stomach combined with the serious but joyful look on his face as he does so and the soft vibrations in her chest is really a lot for her to deal with all at once.

“It’s your notebook,” she says, and she can’t help her grin when he looks up at her, hair sticking up all over and a pink mark in the shape of her mouth on his collarbone, “The leatherbound one.”

“Oh.” She sees the light of recognition in his eyes. “Those nights when you would text me to quit working. I could never figure out how you always knew.”

“I had to say something, or the next text I sent was going to be one asking you to come over and touch me for real.”

His darkened eyes and the dumbstruck look on his face are too much to resist, and she reaches down to wrap a hand around the back of his neck to pull him up to her. They kiss languidly for a few minutes, Olivia letting her hands roam across the warm expanse of his back.

“Is that how you knew?” he asks, nuzzling at the collar of the t-shirt she’d pulled on.

“No, I didn’t even figure out what it was you were writing in until after I knew it was you doing the writing. It was a mystery for more than two decades, but I liked having another connection to you. I figured it out that first day I visited her apartment, when I was looking at your books. Your initials are almost certainly the thing I’ve seen the most in my life, including the back of my own hand, so it wasn’t difficult to connect the dots once I’d seen the real thing. What about you?”

He grins. “The day you took custody of Noah, I ended up with your name all over my back. I thought it was a rash at first,” he says, and she shoves at his shoulder. Rafael flops onto his back with a laugh, extending his arm so she can cuddle against his chest. “If you want, I can- I know with Noah, you might not want me to-”

“Stay,” she says, tightening her arm over his waist when she figures what he’s asking, “Noah thinks you hung the moon, Rafa, he’ll be overjoyed to have you at breakfast, and for you to be around more. I want you to stay, if you want to stay.”

“I’m staying until you kick me out, Liv, if that’s what you want.”

“Might be a while then, if that’s what you’re waiting for,” she says, tracing a finger along the chain of his crucifix, and he grins.

“A man can only hope.”

\--------------

Noah tilts his head, considering what Rafael and his mother had just explained to him, and Rafael reaches out for Olivia’s hand underneath the table.

“Does this mean you’ll make pancakes more and play Legos more and read more stories?”

Rafael lets out the breath he’d been holding with a smile. “Yeah, buddy, I think we can definitely do all that.”

“Okay.” He slides off his own chair and moves to clamber up onto Rafael’s lap. Olivia slides Noah’s plate of pancakes across the table with a laugh.

Noah had been promised a trip to the park, but they stop by Rafael’s apartment first so he can change and grab a bag. He’s fairly quiet the whole trip, and Rafael assumes he’s just excited about the park. When they arrive, however, instead scrambling for the playground, he climbs up onto the bench between Olivia and Rafael.

“Momma?”

“What’s up, sweet boy?”

“Do your colors match Uncle Rafa’s?”

“They do,” Olivia says, rolling up her sleeve so he can see her marks, “See how it says _RB_? Those are the letters that Uncle Rafa’s names start with.”

“Uncle Rafa doesn’t have your letters. He has lots of letters.”

“That’s because your mom really likes to write in her books,” Rafael explains, and Olivia retrieves her book from her purse so Noah can see her notes and their maroon counterparts on his arm.

Noah’s face scrunches up in thought, and Rafael is just about to ask him if there’s something he wants explained more when he looks up at him and asks, “Do you love Momma? Because you told me one time that you love your soulmate, and that’s Momma.”

He didn’t think Noah would remember that, since he’d been half asleep when he’d told him that months ago. His nerves twist at his stomach, but when he looks up at Olivia, her eyes are sparkling.

“Yeah, amigo. I do,” he says, not taking his own eyes off her, and her smile makes his heart feel huge.

“Okay. That’s good.” Noah hops down off the bench like he’s finally satisfied. “Will you push me on the swings, Rafa?”

The entire time Rafael is pushing him, he can feel Olivia writing on his arms. When Noah finally gets bored and runs off to the slides, he heads back to the bench they’d started at to find her barely containing her smirk.

“That’s very distracting, you know,” he says, stretching out his arm out across the back of the bench so she can lean into his side.

“Just wait until I get ahold of your notebook.” His breath catches at the memory of the green marks across her hips and the thought of those sensations across his own skin.

“Looking forward to it.”

“Good to know.” She nudges at his side with an elbow. “So, Barba, you told my kid that you love me before you told me?”

“Well, he asked.”

“Rafael?”

“Olivia?”

“I love you.”

He swallows hard against the lump in his throat, reaching out to trace his finger between several of the green marks on her arms.

“I love you too. So much. Will you- will you and Noah come with me somewhere tomorrow? There’s someone I want you to meet.”

“Showing us off already, Barba?”

“We don’t have t-”

She cups a hand against his cheek and silences him with a kiss. When she pulls away, she swipes her thumb across his bottom lip and he fights a shiver.

“Of course we’ll go, Rafa.”

“Thank you.”

\--------------

The little shop in the Bronx that Rafael takes them to is crowded with bookshelves, but well lit and inviting.

“Un momento, por favor,” someone calls from the back, and Rafael grins.

“Tómate tu tiempo, Tía Claudia.”

“Rafi?” A small woman with a long, dark braid emerges from the shelves, and her face lights up. “Rafael Barba! And you’ve brought visitors.”

“Hola, Tía Claudia. Cómo estás?”

“Bien, bien,” she says, waving him off, “Now are you going to introduce me?”

“This is Olivia Benson and her son Noah.”

“It’s an honor to meet you, señora.”

“Por favor, it’s Claudia. And you would be the famous Lieutenant Benson, yes? That means the honor is mine, although from the stories Rafi tells I half expected you to be nine feet tall and carrying a flaming sword.”

“Tía,” Rafael starts, blushing, but Claudia waves him off again, turning the hand Olivia had offered her to shake so she can examine the green mark on the back of her wrist.

“Rafi, she’s…?”

“Sí,” Rafael says, and Claudia’s grin gets even bigger.

“I always told you, didn’t I? A love story through books, very romantic.”

“You did. Though it’s a little more complicated than that.”

“Most of the best stories are.”

Claudia pulls him into a long hug, and when she finally releases him, she turns to Noah.

“Well, young man, do you like books?” Noah nods. “We should find some for you, don’t you think?” Another nod, and after he checks with Olivia, he follows Claudia back into the shelves.

“So, you really did just want to show us off?” Olivia asks, raising her eyebrows.

“Can you blame me?” His smile is so bright and open it takes her breath away. “I spent a lot of time here growing up, and Claudia… the door was always open for me. I even slept on the couch in the back some nights when I didn’t want to be at home. And she was the first one that really thought that things could work out between my soulmate and I, and she kept believing all these years, no matter what I tried to tell her. I thought she might like to see that she was right after all.”

“Come here,” she whispers, swallowing against the emotion in her throat, and she wraps her arms around him, tucking her face in against his neck, “Thank you for trusting me. For choosing me.”

He nuzzles his nose into her hair. “Thank you for making me brave, Liv. Like I said, I’m here unless you tell me to go.”

“Momma,” Noah says, emerging from the shelves. If he thinks anything about their close proximity, he doesn’t say it. “How many books can I get? Because Tía Claudia has lots.”

“As many as you want,” Rafael says, laughing when Olivia pinches him.

“How about you pick the four that you want the most, and we’ll come and help you figure it out.” Noah nods and disappears again. “You’re a terrible influence.”

“Because I want to buy him lots of books?”

He smirks and she rolls her her eyes.

“Come on then, I think he’ll need your expertise.”

Olivia reaches for his hand, entwining their fingers so she can press her palm against his and feel the reassuring beats of warmth from the soul mark there.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Y'all, it did not even take me a whole month, I'm very proud of myself.
> 
> If you're the kind of person who waits to review until a story is finished (a perfectly valid philosophy), this is probably the place for that. There will be an epilogue, but it's really just two (or maybe three) scenes that are in the universe, but this is really the resolution of the romantic arc of the fic.
> 
> That being said, I hope you enjoyed the story! I had a lot of fun both building the soulmate system and writing the story itself, and I hope it was just as fun to read. As always, any questions or comments are more than welcome. Thank you so much for reading, it really means a lot to me.
> 
> Title of the fic comes from [Each to Each by Penny and Sparrow](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fRbcttVvAzU), and the chapter title is from [Mother Tongue by Joshua Moss](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JHLBhbBTukY). You can also find me at [@awkspiritanimal](twitter.com/awkspiritanimal) or at [awkwardspiritanimals.tumblr.com](awkwardspiritanimals.tumblr.com)
> 
> As far as future projects, I've already got my next one picked and begun (knights!au), and I'm planning on running a twitter poll so that you guys can pick between three different ideas I've got for the one after that, since I like to have more than one project going on at the same time. Edit: If you want to vote for which story goes next in my project queue, you can do that [here](https://twitter.com/awkspiritanimal/status/1114252127579377664)


	4. epilogue

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Some snapshots of our heroes, because the author did not want to write the context for any of these scenes but liked them on their own.

Rafael wakes up to someone running their hand through his hair, and shifts just enough under his pile of blankets to look up at Olivia.

“Feeling any better?” When he nods, she leans down to kiss him softly.

“You’re going to get sick.”

She rolls her eyes. “I slept in the bed last night, Rafa,” she says, and kisses him again to prove her point.

The last two nights, actually. He’d tried to offer to sleep on the couch both nights, but she’d just laughed at him and cuddled up against his back. He hadn’t exactly complained, and not just because it had taken the edge off his chills.

“How was work?”

“ It was fine,” she says, glancing down at her arm, and he furrows his brow at the airy tone of her voice.

“What?”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. Just-” He realizes she’s fighting a smile. “-Exactly how much cough medicine did you have today?”

_ Oh shit.  _ “What’d I do?”

“What makes you think you did anything?”

“Because you’re laughing at me, Olivia,” he says, narrowing his eyes, and she actually does laugh now, holding out her arm for him to see.

_ Liv. Liv. Liv. Liv.  _ Down her arm in green like he’d been trying to get her attention, but when he opens his mouth to apologize for bothering her at work, she shakes her head and turns her arm so he can see what’s written beneath her name.

_ Liv, I think we should get married. Will you marry me? Liv. Liv. Marry me? _

“Oh shit,” he says, glancing at the floor next to the bed, where he can see the copy of  _ Guards! Guards! _ he’d bought for Olivia a few months ago.

_ “I missed your notes when you borrowed my copies.” _

_ “So you want me to reread a book I’ve already read just so you can have more marks on your arms? You remember I’ve got a more than full time job and a kid, right?” _

_ He shrugs. “We’ve got time, yeah?” _

Olivia scoops the book up off the floor and opens the cover so he can see his handwriting on the title page.

“So you’ll write in my books but not your own?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

“I had a plan,” he blurts out, which wasn’t at all what he thought he was going to say.

“A plan?”

“Dinner next week. I was going to ask, and I have a ring, and I was going to do it right. And now…” He trails off, fighting the urge to pull the blankets up to his nose. She’s laughing at him again. “I know it’s ridiculous, but we’d talked about it, and I got the ring from my mother, and I just thought-”

“Barba, before you freak out, maybe you should check my answer?”

“Your-” He sat up, taking a few seconds to let the dizziness pass before holding his arms out in front of him, trying to spot any new marks among the maroon writing on his skin.

“Not there.”

“How did-?” His notebook was sitting on his nightstand.

“You think I can’t pick the brand out in a store after all the times I’ve stolen yours? Plus I might have called Rita.”

“Oh God,” he groans, tilting his head back against the headboard, “She is never going to stop giving me shit about this.”

“Hey. Focus.” She tugs the blankets down to his waist, and he lifts the hem of his shirt so he can see his hips. There’s less writing there, and he spots what he’s looking for immediately.

_ Yes. _

“Yeah?” he asks, and Olivia nods. He scoots across the bed so he can reach his bedside table and retrieve the box he’s had hidden there for the past few weeks. “It was Abuelita’s. I already had it resized.”

“Because you had a plan?”

“I had a plan,” he says, but when Olivia holds out her hand, he pulls the ring out of the box to slide it into place on her finger. She twists her other hand into his t-shirt to tug him towards her.

“I’m sure it was a good plan,” she says, smiling as she kisses him.

\-------------

“Take off your shirt.”

Rafael turns to look at her with wide eyes, and she knows it’s a ridiculous thing to say out of the blue like that, but she’s too overcome by everything to articulate anything else.

“What?”

“Take off your shirt,” she repeats, pulling off her own jacket.

“We don’t have to rush. Our reservation isn’t for a while, and Noah just sat down to wat-”

“Barba. Take. Off. Your shirt.”

“Liv, the door’s not even clo-”

She kicks it closed behind her and raises her eyebrows at him as she starts on the buttons of her own shirt. He sighs but finally starts to follow instructions.

“You sure you don’t want to wait on this until tonight, once Noah’s in bed?”

“Get your mind out of the gutter.”

“Sorry, where would you like my mind to be while you’re ordering me to take my clothes off?”

“Not your clothes, your shirt. I want to see your back.”

“My- Oh,” he says, and his fingers fumble on his buttons for a moment as he realizes what she’s talking about.

They’ve been married for a few months now, and Noah has been calling Rafael  _ Dad _ for even longer, but they’d wanted him to have his own day to celebrate officially, so they’d held off on the actual paperwork until now. Olivia is glad they waited, but now that it’s done, she doesn’t want to waste another second; she’s wanted to see this since Rafael had told her how he’d figured out they were soulmates.

He drops his shirt onto the bed and pulls his undershirt up over his head, and she grins at the maroon writing across his skin in the repeating shapes of her signature and initials. Her grin widens at the way he shivers as she traces over them with the tips of her fingers.

“I show you mine, you show me yours?” he says, turning his own grin towards her over his shoulder, and she pinches him.

“Out of the gutter,” she says, but turns anyway so that he can see her marks. He leans forward to press his lips against her bare shoulder, warm palm pressed against her stomach as he wrapped one arm around her waist.

“Beautiful.”

“You’re not even looking at them,” she says, fighting to keep her voice steady despite the fact that so much of his bare skin pressed against her marks shakes her whole chest feel like it’s shaking.

“I wasn’t talking about the marks.”

“You’re ridiculous.”

“You’re the one ordering me to strip with no context.”

“You love it.”

“I do. Come on,” he says, pressing another kiss against her neck, “Let’s get dressed and go see what the kid is watching. You can oogle my marks all you want later.”

“Like you’re not doing the same thing.”

“Again, not really looking at your marks.”

She thinks about pinching him again, but decides on kissing him instead.

\-----------------

“Do you and Mom both sign all my permission slips because of some soulmate thing?”

“Hmm?” Rafael looks up at where Noah is sitting across the table, working on his homework.

“Mrs. Ramsey told me that I should tell you and Mom that only one of you really needs to sign my permission slips, and I told her you both sign them because of some soulmate thing.”

“Oh. Yeah.”

“Figured. You guys do weird stuff because you’re soulmates.”

“We do not.”

“What don’t we do?” Olivia asks, emerging from their bedroom.

“Our son says we’re weird because we’re soulmates,” Rafael says, and Noah rolls his eyes.

“I didn’t say you were weird because you’re soulmates. I said you did weird stuff because you’re soulmates. You do weird stuff for other reasons too. You’re weird.”

Rafael thinks he should probably be at least a little offended, but Noah is grinning and Olivia is smiling as she drapes her arms around his shoulders, and it’s the sort of moment that he and Olivia never really got when they were growing up. The fact that he gets to be part of making that possible for Noah still threatens to take his breath away, even after all these years.

“How about you come help me with dinner while your father finishes his paperwork so we don’t get any of our weirdness near the food,” Olivia says, still leaning against his back, and Noah pulls a face.

“Gross,” he responds, but his smile returns as he puts his homework away.

Olivia presses a kiss against Rafael’s shoulder through his shirt, right at the place where her signature is written across his skin.


End file.
